Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits

"Mohawk Saint is about a 17th century Mohawk Native American who joins a Christian community in a place called Kahnawake on the St Lawrence river—just upstream from Montreal. It’s under the pastoral care of a Jesuit mission from France. Catherine converts when she’s 18 or so and then dies from smallpox aged 24, on April 17, 1680. This is another example of a book where there’s massive learning behind it—but it’s a short book and a real page-turner. It’s wonderfully compact and an example of what you might call ‘micro-cultural’ history. He’s evoking a local world that allows him to explore big themes in great detail. The main one here is the colonial encounter between Native Americans and French Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century. He’s putting her life into that context as well as the life of Claude Chauchetière, a Jesuit from Poitiers, who goes out to Canada and arrives in the same village, Kahnawake, about three months after Catherine. He observes her formation as a Christian, as an ascetic, and while sitting by her deathbed he is convinced—by the beautiful death that he thinks she had—that she is a saint. These are the two star-crossed protagonists of the story. There are parallels in their lives that the author draws out. He doesn’t overegg, he doesn’t overburden, but this whole book is about their meeting, from which we have Saint Catherine Tekakwitha. Greer is working with scraps. He has very little direct evidence of her experience but remnants of information that we learn from a few different hagiographical works written 20-30 years after her death. He’s reconstructing the context and gradually liberating her life from the fantasies of these Jesuits. He is giving her space to breathe as a Native American woman going through a conversion experience to Christianity. He’s showing the power of her life in effecting the way that they react to her. In that sense, it is a beautifully feminist piece of salvage history. It’s also about race. It’s breaks down the assumptions and the boundaries between the normative historical accounts we hear about great, civilised western people engaging with these savage primitive people. It’s a wonderful examination of syncretism—the nuts and bolts of what happens when you get these different worlds colliding with each other. She wasn’t made a saint until 2012. She was locally venerated as a saint by the French colonial community in the area. These Jesuits functioned, in some ways—like our 4th century bishops—as impresarios, managing the healing cures that her remains performed. They took dirt from her tomb and aspects of relics from her clothing to heal people and cure people. The Native Americans didn’t venerate her as a posthumous cult at all. That was something that was totally alien to their expectations of what the dead are. But his final chapter discusses the reception of her cult in modern America. He talks about how different Native American communities have imagined her and made use of her as an anti-colonial emblem. She’s their saint. It’s a beautifully rich evocation of a world in which you don’t have these two blocks of uniform, unchanging civilisations bumping into each other. The Native American world, at this time, is caught up in wars that are totally destroying communities. These communities are then reconstituting themselves through the adoption of enemy villages and captives. I call Catherine a Mohawk, but her mother was an Algonquin who was captured when she was young. Iroquois is the generic name for American Indians of this area, of which the Mohawks are one. Part of their struggle, in these bellicose times, was to reconstitute themselves from captives in war through a horrifying, but effective, reception ritual. They have their battles, they win, they take captives, they bring their captives back to the village. Some of those captives are ritually tortured by the children and the women of the village. They have bits cut out of them, they have firebrands held to their feet, they are lacerated, they’re whipped, and then they’re killed. This is all a performance for those who are chosen to survive, and, after this, are invited to take on a new identity as Mohawks rather than their old ethnic groups. Catherine’s mum was pregnant with Catherine when she has this experience. She was married to one of the Mohawks. Once you were embraced within the community, it was incredibly generous. Greer is wonderful in the way that he explains the logic of what we, perhaps, and, certainly Europeans of the time, regarded as savage behaviour. He’s really good on the sophistication and rationality—social, communal, and also technological—of these people. Recent popes have been very enthusiastic about canonising and blessing candidates. In 2006 there was a report of a second miracle—the healing of a boy in Washington state—which put her in the frame to be canonised. You need to have two miracles, nowadays. Your first one makes you a ‘blessed’ and the second one makes you a saint. There’s a whole legal process, or enquiry. This goes into the medical proofs of miracles. There also has to be evidence of a life lived according to the moral and spiritual qualifications of the saints. It’s changed over the centuries and, in recent years, especially the 1980s, the whole process has been accelerated because John Paul II was a very enthusiastic canoniser. I’m quite fond of Catherine but it’s incredible how much he makes out of the little direct evidence we have for her. That’s not to say he has made it up, but the way he provides a wonderful context for thinking about her is very appealing. I’m also interested in the way she has divided communities of the faithful in the 20th century. You could ask, why does anybody value any material object? Why do we put value in money? It’s not clear exactly how money works, other than through our diffuse mass-agreement that it does work and the assumption that somewhere there is some sort of authority that’s checking up on it and backing it up. In some ways, there are a lot of similarities between relics and money. They enable people to do things together, they enable people to complete transactions, to trust each other remotely, to lay a claim to the past or to put a claim on the future of other people’s duties and obligations. To me, they are a very useful, symbolically saturated physical media through which humans engage socially with each other in lots of different ways. That’s my way of thinking about it, which is to look at what people actually do with relics rather than simply accept the claims made about them by literate elites. And, it is to insist on the vibrancy and vitality of whatever objects we culturally enlist for various purposes as well."