All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  She twists around in the front seat to face me. “That is the legend of the sea creature, and this is where he lives. Every now and then he pulls cars in, and every so often there will be multiple deaths. Kids on snowmobiles go into the water and die.”

  ¡Aye! This is worse than La Llorona, the ghost-woman of Mexican folklore who scours the waterways, searching for the little kids she murdered. Way worse, actually, because no matter where you travel in Akwesasne, water is near. At least in South Texas, you can avoid what is wet. Diane lets out another cackle, and we peel out of Kanatakon, back toward the main strip. Vera points out an abandoned building that used to house slot machines in the eighties.

  “We must have had, what, eleven casinos back then? And they only employed Indians, every one,” Diane says.

  “That was the first time Indians were able to have both a car and a truck and could buy groceries every week,” Vera adds. “Now all the whites get the jobs and the Indians get nothing.”

  Which system would better support the average Mohawk: a bunch of freewheeling independent casinos that hire friends and family, or one mammoth casino that doles out equal benefits for all? It is strange to think of a casino as a socialist enterprise, but that might be the case for the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino. So was the 1989–90 war a rare instance of communalism defeating capitalism? Or did it follow a more typical narrative of a string of mom-and-pop shops getting quashed by a larger, sleeker moneyed operation?

  “That was Wild Bill’s,” Vera says, pointing through her side window. “It used to be a full-blown casino. Now it’s just a gas station. That blue building there was Lucky Nights. Gone. Three Feathers used to be jumping. Not any more.”

  The more bolted planks the women point out, the more I recognize another feature of southern border life: the ghost town.

  “You would never believe the money Indians used to have. There were two money exchange places here. At the mall, there was a store in every cubicle,” Vera says.

  “And now,” Diane says, twisting backward in her seat for a final time, “now there is nothing at all.”

  NOTES

  1. Months later, I’ll relay this explanation to a Mohawk, and she’ll laugh and call it a “bullshit performance for white tourists.” I will join in the laughter and say I had thought as much, but truthfully, I hadn’t.

  2. Another factoid about porcupines that seems improbable but isn’t: they can climb trees. Because they prefer the tenderest buds on the farthest tips of branches, they can also fall out of trees. Many a North Country camping story includes a porcupine nearly landing on somebody’s head.

  3. Exactly when this historic event took place is subject to much debate. Scholars who take oral tradition and solar eclipse data into consideration generally say 1142. Those who don’t say 1451 or later. Whatever the case, it seems to have predated colonization.

  4. The Haudenosaunee take great pride in counting Benjamin Franklin as one of their confederacy’s many admirers. Some scholars say that certain features of the U.S. Constitution, with its balance of federal authority and states’ rights, were inspired by the Haudenosaunee’s governing system.

  5. Though I haven’t found references to this society prior to the 1980s in (outsider) scholarship, Warriors themselves say they have existed for centuries and were simply “reengaged” during the casino war. Historically, they say, the society advocated for peace unless instructed otherwise by the clan mothers.

  6. Most books refer to this incident as a firebombing, yet two Indian Time staffers I interviewed—Helen Lazore and Deb Cook—say that their building suffered an electrical fire. “The community was so divided, it was easy to believe it was arson,” Cook said. Lazore added that the morning after, “we went there and we all cried. Everything was gone, all the typewriters burned, the desks, everything. Indian Time too.”

  7. According to a 1769 pamphlet called The Story of the Rice Boys by the Reverend Ebenezer Parkman, which I found in a library, the Rice brothers “mixd with the Indians; lost their Mother Tongue; had indian Wives, & Children by them and liv’d at Cagnawaga. Their Friends among us had news of them not long since, that they were then alive; So that they may be in all probability there still.”

  8. As per the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, Class I (social games) falls under jurisdiction of the tribe, Class II (bingo and related games) under the tribe and the National Indian Gaming Commission, and Class III (all other games) under the tribe and the state.

  9. A report published by the tribe—The Economic Impact of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe 2008 by Jonathan B. Taylor—confirms that 72 percent of casino employees and 60 percent of bingo employees are non-Indian. According to the tribe’s website, www.srmt-nsn.gov, its 1,600 employees make St. Regis one of the largest private employers in the North Country.

  10. Because New York State did nothing to stop operations at Three Feathers Casino (or another unlicensed casino opened by a Mohawk outside Akwesasne)—despite the tribe’s exclusivity rights—the tribal government began withholding tens of millions of dollars in revenue-sharing to the state in 2010, then later used that money as leverage in its decades-long struggle to take back some of its contested land in neighboring counties. In 2015, the Mohawks celebrated their first victory toward expanding their nation by regaining a thirty-nine-acre parcel in the nearby town of Fort Covington. Monitor future reacquisitions at www.resolvetheboundary.com.

  11. A year later, in December 2013, three of these defendants were cleared of charges when the jury decided that the controversy over Three Feathers Casino was an intertribal conflict and not a federal one. Laughing received a mistrial for not attending the trial, due to illness. One of the freed Mohawk defendants—a former ironworker named Tommy “Salt” Square—sat in jail for the ten months prior to the trial as a form of protest. “They appointed me a lawyer and I didn’t accept because you can’t fight as a sovereign people with their lawyer,” Salt told me a few months after his release. “I have been a researcher of white man commercial law, so I spent the whole time [in jail] reading.”

  12. Great resources for a gambling opponent’s perspective can be found in Doug George-Kanentiio’s 2006 book, Iroquois on Fire: A Voice from the Mohawk Nation, and in Bruce Johansen’s 1993 book, Life and Death in Mohawk Country.

  13. According to the Mohawk who said that claiming to gain the spiritual protection of a porcupine by snaring its quills is an identity “performance,” the same is true of telling time by the moon. Tejanas, of course, are guilty of this, too. Show us an organic, vegan, gluten-free tortilla, and see how we wax poetic about the hand-rolled, lard-laden, GMO tortillas our abuelitas used to make (while stashing the other kind in our cupboard).

  14

  The Saint

  RIVULETS OF FOG BURN OFF THE ST. LAWRENCE RIVER AS I DESCEND into the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake from the lower lip of Montreal, Canada. The sky is slate and moody. At the foot of the bridge, I consider the options.

  Continuing south onto Highway 138 will deposit me in the so-called Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Monaco of the online gambling world. Mohawk Internet Technologies is its name, although people prefer its collegiate acronym, MIT. The web-hosting company runs hundreds of the Internet’s biggest poker, casino, and sportsbook sites1 out of an old mattress factory that’s been converted into a high-security fortress off the side of the highway. Nongovernmental gambling is illegal in Canada, but Kahnawake Mohawks shrug off such technicalities by asserting their sovereign authority granted by their First Nation status. They issue their own passports (the Haudenosaunee), employ their own police force (the Peacekeepers), and otherwise “do all they can to live a political life robustly, with dignity as Nationals,” according to Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson. Their highway defiantly yields a string of (in Canada’s eyes, illegal) poker houses that deal Texas Hold ’Em, Omaha, Seven Card Stud, Lowball, and Draw High twenty-four hours a day, plus scores of tax-free smoke shops: Brad’s Butts, Best Butts, McSmokes, Diabo’s Discount, Mohawk Discount,
and Another Dam Cigarette Store, to name a few.

  All the fun is south of here, in other words, but today I’m feeling pious. Turning west, I follow the river toward an old fishing village dotted with fieldstone houses. Streets have no names in Kahnawake. The official town map lists only landmarks: “behind Mohawk Market,” “near Eileen’s Bakery,” “behind Pit Stop Convenience,” “Blind Lady’s Hill.” But my destination is easy to find. I simply follow the traffic to an eighteenth-century Catholic church with a weathercock atop its steeple. Television crews swarm the entrance while beefy Peacekeepers lean against their squad cars. I follow a mother herding her young sons through the double doors but get halted at the vestibule. The church is packed to the apse.

  Peeking over shoulders, I catch a few glimpses. A gold-robed bishop wielding a staff like a shepherd. A pew full of women wearing long navy capes that, when flicked over the shoulder, reveal a scarlet lining beneath. Baskets of dried corn tied with ribbons. An elder in a buckskin vest and a traditional feathered headdress called a kastowa. Intricately beaded bands wrapped around wrists. A dark-robed monk fingering prayer beads. And the focus of everyone’s attention: a white marble tomb laden with lilies.

  Mass is half an hour away, but the pews are so packed, the aisles are filling too. The ushers don’t like this one bit. Each is wearing a traditional calico shirt with brightly colored ribbons streaming from his shoulders. One gravitates toward the stragglers in my vicinity. There is a spillover room at the school, he says. Live-stream footage, straight from the Vatican.

  No one acknowledges him. History is happening upon that altar, inside that tomb—history three centuries in the making. Some of us crossed multiple time zones to be at the Mission of Saint Francis Xavier today. No way we’re leaving.

  The first usher walks away scowling and a larger one returns. We try to look busy, the stragglers. We scramble for the church bulletins. We dunk our fingers into holy water and flick it all over ourselves.

  “You must leave,” he says. “All of you.”

  We continue maneuvering around the vestibule with purpose, as if a new pew will materialize from the woodwork any minute. The usher takes a middle-aged Filipina by the elbow. “If you don’t leave now, you’ll be arrested.”

  “This is a church,” she yells. “It is open to the people.”

  For an instant, there is energy. Ushers vs. Stragglers, center vestibule. But then the doors swing open and uniformed Peacekeepers march in. The Filipina seems up for the fight, but the rest of our collective will vanishes at the sight of armed officers. We hustle toward the door.

  “You force us away,” the Filipina accuses the men with ribbons dangling from their chests. “May God have mercy on your soul!”

  With that, we are back in the street with the camera crews. I spot the lone newspaper reporter and walk over. He greets me with a cheery, “This is the most action this place has seen since Oka!”

  Which is saying a lot. Soon after Akwesasne’s casino war quelled in 1990, tempers started flaring here in Kahnawake over the proposed expansion of a golf course onto ancestral land in nearby Oka, Quebec. One band of Mohawks (including Warriors from Akwesasne) descended upon the town and staged an armed standoff that lasted seventy-eight days; another barricaded the bridge connecting Montreal to the South Shore for a month. In the protests that ensued, a Sûreté du Québec police officer was killed, hundreds were injured, and Mohawk symbols were burned in effigy. A quarter century later, Oka remains the three-letter reason why Ottawa strives to avoid conflict with Kahnawake.

  The reporter adds that he has interviewed people who drove twelve hours to be here this morning, people who don’t even have a place to sleep. They’re all in that gym now, he says, nodding toward the elementary school across the street. Praying and waiting.

  I depart to do the same, inside the schoolhouse that bears her name.

  THE OUTSIDE WORLD has called her many things. Katharine, which her tribe pronounced as Kateri. Lily of the Mohawks, because the delicate flowers purportedly sprung from her grave. The Mohawk Maiden. The New Star of the New World. The Fairest Flower That Ever Bloomed among Red Men. The Venerable. The Beatified. Today—October 21, 2012—she will acquire her grandest name yet: Saint Kateri, Native America’s first Catholic saint. Earlier this week, hundreds of Mohawks chartered flights to Rome to celebrate her canonization at the Vatican. I have joined the hundreds who converged at her tomb.

  While Mohawks claim Kateri as their own, her mother was actually a Catholic Algonquin who studied with French missionaries before getting kidnapped by a Mohawk war party. Forcibly adopted into their tribe, she married a chief and bore him a son as well as Kateri in 1656. Four years later, smallpox nearly obliterated the family. Little Kateri lost her father, mother, and brother as well as some of her eyesight. Forever after, she’d wear a shroud to shield her damaged eyes from the sun. The disease also ravaged her face (though she later expressed gratitude for this, as it helped repel suitors). An aunt and uncle absorbed Kateri into their own family at a longhouse2 tucked in the present-day Mohawk Valley of upstate New York.

  Jesuit missionaries were widely recruiting Indian souls at that time. Having a spiritual culture of their own, the Mohawks initially rejected Catholicism, turning the priests into slaves and occasionally drinking their blood.3 But after losing a few key battles to the French, they conceded to admitting Jesuits into their villages. Kateri encountered Catholicism around age eleven and took to it with fervor, abandoning her Longhouse duties to devote herself to prayer. This angered her elders, particularly her aunts, who wanted to marry her off. By the time the Jesuits baptized Kateri at twenty-one, she had become the scorn of her tribe, accused of everything from laziness to sorcery. When an opportunity arose to join the Mission of Saint Francis Xavier on the bank of the St. Lawrence River, she snatched it.

  At Kahnawake, Kateri caught the attention of Fathers Pierre Cholenec and Claude Chauchetière, whose writings immortalize her today. Watching her take the body and blood of Christ for the first time, Cholenec noted, “She approached or rather surrendered herself to this furnace of sacred love that burns on our altars, and she came out of it so glowing with its divine fire that only Our Lord knew what passed between Himself and His dear spouse during her First Communion.”

  Thus betrothed, Kateri commenced a life of extreme asceticism. She gave away her beads and her dresses, her moccasins and her necklaces, and wore only a plain blue frock. She sprinkled ashes in her food to deny her palate pleasure. In the frost of winter, she would arrive at the chapel door long before it opened and linger well after it closed. She befriended an Oneida woman who shared her zeal, and the two took turns beating each other with tree branches—1,000 slashes per session—as blood rippled down their shoulders. (Among her confessed sins: loving her body more than she should.) Although Cholenec noticed “mysterious light” engulfing Kateri as she flagellated, he encouraged her to use less punishing weapons: a whip, a sackcloth, a hair shirt, an iron girdle bristling with spikes. Instead, Kateri moved on to branding crosses into her legs. To plucking coals from the fire and placing them between her toes. To gathering armloads of thorns, scattering them across her bed mat, and pressing them into her flesh as she slept. “And although in my heart I admired her, I pretended to be displeased,” Cholenec wrote.

  Reading her biography today, you’d be forgiven for drawing the worrisome conclusion that Kateri was a masochist whose suicidal tendencies were encouraged by kinky priests. Yet historian Allan Greer argues otherwise in his book Mohawk Saint. For starters, he says, seventeenth-century Haudenosaunee were master torturers—not only of their enemies but also of themselves. Shamans reached into fire and grabbed hot coals during ceremonies; warriors lacerated themselves as a way of mentally preparing for battle. Greer suggests that the self-torture of Kateri and others might have been a sort of hardening exercise to elevate their courage in their quest to achieve spiritual power. After enduring so many years of sickness, war, and dislocation, they aspir
ed “not only to invest their suffering with meaning but also to cross the threshold of the divine,” he writes.

  Kateri’s body ultimately lacked the resilience of her spirit. She grew wretchedly ill not long after her arrival. Rather than seek medical attention for their prodigy, the priests argued over her purity, as incest was rumored in her home village. Kateri spent her final weeks alone on her mat, vomiting and praying before gasping, “Never give up mortification” and “I will love you in heaven, I will pray for you, I will assist you.” Then she coughed and said no more, dead at twenty-four. Cholenec later remembered, “[Her] face, so marked and swarthy, suddenly changed about a quarter of an hour after her death, and became in a moment so beautiful and so white that I observed it immediately (for I was praying beside her) and cried out, so great was my astonishment. … I admit openly that the first thought that came to me was that Katharine at that moment might have entered into heaven, reflecting in her chaste body a small ray of the glory of which her soul had taken possession.”

  Six days after her death, a priest glimpsed Kateri in the rising sun. Friends heard her calling their name in the night. Prophecies came to pass, of the destruction of a chapel and the torching of an Indian at a stake. Mourners began to fill tiny bags with earth from her grave and wear them as amulets around their necks. They steeped the ashes of her clothing and drank it like tea. Women cried out to Kateri as they suffered through labor—not only Mohawks but French Canadians as well. In Montreal, they sought her intercession for everything from resisting vice to harvesting crops. The cult of Kateri grew over the centuries. Churches from Santa Fe to Manitoba erected shrines in her honor. Schools and summer camps adopted her name. Devotees invested in her reliquary. People in need of a miracle asked for one, no matter how extraordinary. Today, Pope Benedict XVI will canonize Kateri for stopping a flesh-eating bacteria from killing a Lummi boy in Washington in 2006—after a whole team of doctors could not.