The Lily of the Mohawks: Kateri Tekakwitha at Fonda

The land you are passing through was once called Caughnawaga, a Mohawk village that stood on this exact ground for generations. It is remembered today because of one woman who lived here: Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American canonized as a Catholic saint.

Kateri was born in sixteen fifty-six a few miles east of here at the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, near present-day Auriesville. When she was four years old, a smallpox epidemic swept through the valley. Both of her parents and her infant brother died. Kateri survived, but the disease left her partially blind and her face permanently scarred. She came to live here at Caughnawaga, now the site of Fonda, in her uncle's household around sixteen sixty-six.

The Jesuits had been moving through the Mohawk Valley for decades. When a missionary named Father Jacques de Lamberville arrived here, Kateri sought him out. In sixteen seventy-six, against the wishes of her family and clan, she converted to Catholicism. The community turned hostile. She faced daily harassment, was denied food on Sundays for observing the Sabbath, and had stones thrown at her. A year after her baptism, she fled about two hundred miles north to a Christian Mohawk community near Montreal.

There she spent the remaining three years of her life in intense prayer and physical mortification, cared for by other Christian Native women. She died in sixteen eighty at the age of twenty-four. Witnesses at her deathbed reported that the smallpox scars on her face disappeared moments after her death.

She was beatified in nineteen eighty by Pope John Paul the Second and canonized in two thousand twelve by Pope Benedict the Sixteenth. The National Shrine of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, located here at the site of her baptism and her adolescent years, draws pilgrims from across North America and around the world.