The Story of Saint Kateri: Patroness of the Environment
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I live in a culture that, by and large, is disconnected from nature. I live in a house with screened windows and closed doors. I buy food (or have it delivered) from farms I will never visit—food I did not bend to the ground to nurture or water or harvest myself.
I have animals in my home, but they are domesticated. I do not interact with the skunks or foxes or deer or squirrels or cardinals or crows who live around me. In fact, I saw a sign the other day, a large advertisement for ridding my yard of any and all animals I don't want—as if this land belongs to us and us alone, as if it doesn't matter who else might live here, as if all that matters is my comfort and desire for control.
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking has persisted in this country for centuries, affecting not only our natural environment but even the people who settled here long before the concept of billboards or interstates or modern infrastructure had been conceived in modern minds.
This is the story of one of those people, and it begins in a place dear to my heart.
Finger Lakes, New York
Circa 1000 A.D.—The ancestors of the Iroquois settle into this land.
July 2010—This land becomes the place where I nearly lose my life.
During the early evening hours of Friday, July 16, 2010, I and my young cousin were enjoying the last ride of the evening, tubing together behind a family friend’s boat on Canandaigua Lake (one of the Finger Lakes). Not realizing how close the shore was—until it was too late—we were thrown out of the wake and into a wooden boat dock, not unlike the one pictured above. According to the police, we hit at approximately 50 miles per hour.
An ambulance carried us from the shoreline of the lake to a nearby field. From there, we were life-flighted to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, where they treated our broken femurs and other injuries. We remained in the hospital for two weeks and, upon discharge, continued treatment and therapy for about three months.
Praise God, our lives were spared. Praise God, we can still walk. Yesterday, I even ran.
But some 400 years prior to this—long before my extended family ever settled in upstate New York—a young girl named Kateri Tekakwitha (pronounced teh-kuh-WI-thuh) was born about 180 miles east of this lake, at a Mohawk fortress, in a place known today as Auriesville, New York.
A Little About Kateri
For almost five hundred years, until 1492, the Iroquois resided in what we now call upstate New York without fear of outside intrusion. But once Columbus broke ground, it was only a matter of time before the French, Dutch, and English moved in, exterminating the locals, as needed, to make room for themselves.
The Iroquois, caught in this tension, banded together to become the Five Nations of the Iroquois League. But Kateri belonged to the Mohawk tribe, which relied heavily on the strength of its own warriors and, thus, resisted unifying with others, especially tribes who were making treaties with “foreign white men.”[i]
Living amid tribal wars and settlement raids, Kateri also faced another consequence of invasion when smallpox—“brought into Iroquois territories by white men”[ii]—personally touched her and her village in 1660. Because of this outbreak, Kateri lost her mother, her young brother, and her father within a short span. She ultimately recovered, but not without permanent damage.
Half-blind and now orphaned, Kateri was only four years old.
How Kateri Became a Christian
I’m not doing Kateri’s story justice. A book—Saint Kateri: Lily of the Mohawks—goes into far more detail, but ultimately, Kateri became a Christian because of her mother. She was quietly raised to know and love the Lord in a tribe that resisted all things outsider, including every word preached by “foreign white men.”
The Mohawks, particularly aggressive, even went so far as to publicly torture and execute the “Black Robes” (Jesuit priests) who came from Europe to minister to the village.
Please understand: I’m not trying to cast self-righteous judgment on a group of people who had every right to fear and mistrust the foreigners who were stealing, pummeling, and pulverizing their land. These “Black Robes,” unfortunately, were caught in the crosshairs of that reality. They were white, just as the dangerous invaders were. And so, they were lumped into the same category and treated as such.
But to be clear, Pope Paul III in 1537, the adviser of these Jesuit priests who were sent to minister to the Mohawks and other tribes, declared in no uncertain terms:
The said Indians [the name attributed to local peoples at the time because Columbus thought himself to be in India] and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ.[iii]
I include that to make the point that the priests ministering to the Mohawks were guided by a principle of respect and tolerance for the native peoples. Kateri, thus, connected to and trusted these men, including Father Boniface (d. 1674) and Father Jacques de Lamberville.
Father Jacques, ultimately, became responsible for securing Kateri’s way out of Mohawk territory and into a sanctuary where she could practice her Christianity openly, a place known as Sault Mission near Montréal.
How Kateri Became a Saint
To be canonized in the Catholic Church is no small feat. A lengthy investigation takes place to assess the life, virtues, and witness of the candidate. Not to mention, there must be two verified miracles.
Saint Kateri was not canonized (declared a saint) until two years after I nearly lost my life on the waters that she likely knew and that may well have provided for her and her family during her years among the Mohawks.
Why is she a saint? Again, the book goes into more detail, but it seems to me that the way her tribe promoted a warrior spirit had an impact on her. Yet she did not channel her tenacity toward violence, but to prayer.
A true prayer warrior—in every sense of the phrase.
By those who lived among her, she’s described as being “in communion with God wherever her routine took her, and her rapture was evidence on her face.”[iv] And to those who lived after her (she died at the age of 24), they “proclaimed that she was already in heaven and would be praying for those still on earth.”[v]
In fact, in an account by Father Pierre Rémy, who served at the Montréal mission during her life and after her death, the fruits of her intercession were already being seen: he wrote of “thirty claims of cures, healings, and intercessions that took place after individuals implored her intercession.”[vi]
How Saint Kateri Connects to the Environment
I started this piece by reflecting on a truth: I live in a culture that, by and large, is disconnected from nature.
It is this reality that has driven me, in the past year or so, to reflect on the writings, particularly the poetry, written by ancestors of the first peoples who inhabited the land I live on. One collection, titled Native American Songs and Poems, highlights the celebration of nature in a poem titled “Song of the Earth”:
The Earth is beautiful.
The Earth is beautiful.
The Earth is beautiful.[vii]
These are the poem’s first three lines, repeated in case we missed it the first time. Or even the second. Repeated to help the idea really land: this place we inhabit, it’s beautiful. It’s a gift. And as a Christian, I recognize why: because of the One who made it and gifted it to us.
In discovering these poems, I also discovered Saint Kateri, who has been named patroness of the environment. This means one of her great causes—for which she intercedes and daily prays—is the care and well-being of our beautiful Earth. And this, because to do so is embedded in her culture:
Like the rest of her people, she understood the importance of finding balance with the natural world and of exercising a proper stewardship of the earth’s resources.[viii]
How All of This Connects to Me (and You)
Perhaps one of the greatest changes we can make to become better stewards of the Earth, God’s gift to us, is to reconnect ourselves to it. To open our windows, even the screens. To walk barefoot on the grass. To touch a growing leaf. To watch a hawk long enough to see it land and perch and fly away.
Why? Because in connecting with what God gave us, we see its value, its indispensability, and yes, its deep, abiding, Creator-given beauty.
The Earth is beautiful. 💛
Saint Kateri, pray for us. May we become stewards of the gift that this world is. May our stewardship shine as a light in darkness. And may our light point only and always to the ultimate grace, tenderness, and respect modeled by the greatest gift of all, God’s only Son.Notes
[i] Matthew and Margaret Bunson, Saint Kateri: Lily of the Mohawks (Our Sunday Visitor, 2012), 87.
[ii] Bunson, 87.
[iii] Bunson, 65.
[iv] Bunson, 205.
[v] Bunson, 208.
[vi] Bunnon, 212-213
[vii] Brian Swann, ed., “Song of the Earth,” Native American Songs and Poems (Dover Publications, 1996), 7.
[viii] Bunson, 24
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