Maybe this is what draws so many people to Kahnawake today: the prospect of impossibility.
I, however, have come because of a nostalgia that started percolating last Sunday, when I attended Mass at St. Regis Catholic Church back at Akwesasne. During the homily, the Reverend John Downs4 commented on how Native Americans had long struggled with the fact that foreign missionaries introduced them to Christ but now had a sense that “once we have a saint, we will truly be part of this church, because one of us will be declared holy. We will have better self-esteem and a better image of ourselves as First Nations people because of it.”
Afterward, I met up with Bernice Lazore, the seventy-year-old founder of the Kateri Prayer Circle. She was introduced to Christianity by her grandfather and became enamored with Kateri when an aunt told her, “Whenever you are down or need something, pray to her.” And Bernice did, throughout her childhood. Eventually, though, her grandfather left the church for the more traditionally Mohawk Longhouse and took most of their family with him. Bernice wanted to join them but couldn’t bear the thought of abandoning Kateri. (The fact that Christian Mohawks routinely derided Longhouse members as “pagans” didn’t help matters, either.) Her grandfather finally suggested a compromise: come to the Longhouse to receive an Indian name and learn a Mohawk song, then continue on with Catholicism. Bernice has pursued two spiritual practices ever since, upholding certain ceremonies of the Longhouse as well as making regular pilgrimages to Kahnawake to pray at Kateri’s tomb; traveling to Fonda, New York, for retreats at Kateri’s temple; and flying to the Vatican to celebrate Kateri’s advancements toward sainthood.
This story of straddling divergent worlds sounded familiar, of course, as did the blending of belief systems that could be considered a form of spiritual mestizaje. Yet déjà vu didn’t fully strike until Bernice mentioned the time her cousin was making chicken and dumplings, got called out on an errand, returned home to clean up the mess, and then made a surprising discovery.
“She called me and said, ‘You wouldn’t believe what happened. Kateri is on my flour board.’”
“Flour board?” I asked.
Oh yes. Bernice ran over with her camera, and sure enough, there was Kateri, emblazoned across the flour. “You had to imagine it to see it, but I could see the outline of her face. While we were talking, all of these people were coming in to look at it. Then my cousin was pouring coffee and she spilled it right in the middle of the board, but it was okay, the coffee faded and didn’t even stain. To this day, she has the flour board on her altar with photos and candles.”
That’s when I realized why Kateri seemed so familiar. Though it’s disrespectful to compare such complicated belief systems, I couldn’t help seeing flashes of the icons of the southern borderlands—Mother Julia, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and La Malinche—in this northern saint.
BACK AT KAHNAWAKE, the spillover room is spilling over too. Some 300 Haudenosaunee men in ribbon shirts, First Nations women in floral skirts, Anglophones, Francophones, and nuns in puffy coats gather around a projection screen in the middle of a gym, kneeling, sitting, standing, and shaking hands as Mass dictates. I watch a while, then wander over to the cafeteria, which is decorated with children’s artwork. One poster depicts Kateri as a barefoot maiden draped in a blanket and dragging a hulking cross. Another says KATERI IDOL in huge block letters and lists the top contestants: Arlene Goodleaf (“Leader of the Pack”), Winter Aaliyah (“Call Me Maybe”), and Hayley Deer (“Eye of the Tiger”).
Seated around the lunch tables are the pilgrims who found no room at the gym. The Filipina from the vestibule is telling whoever will listen how she drove all the way from Ottawa only to get shut out in the cold. She’s boycotting Mass altogether now. When I ask her about the Filipino connection to Kateri, she explains that one of their own5 is being canonized today, too. Those who couldn’t fly all the way to Rome traveled to Kahnawake instead. I can’t decide if this makes perfect sense or no sense whatsoever, visiting a stranger’s tomb in a faraway place because she is being recognized on the same day for the same achievement as another stranger buried even farther away—but it probably makes about as much sense as being here at all.
A First Nations woman appears then like sudden snow: white shoes, white pants, white coat, white scarf, white hair cascading past her elbows. Gripping her walker, she maneuvers toward some bags of groceries and attempts to lift one up. I offer assistance in English and she accepts in French. We head out to her minivan, speaking a hybrid of the two. Her name is Marie-Louise, and once she shares key biographical facts—she’s Algonquin, the daughter of a fur trapper, and an alumna of the Amos Indian Residential School—a possible story line takes shape.
Her father’s profession hints of a childhood spent in the bush. From her elders, she learned the plants that nourished and the plants that healed. She watched the men hunt and fish and helped the women gut, skin, and cure the meat. She bathed in the river. She danced in the woods. She plaited her hair in two. At night she burrowed between the crook of a brother’s back and the hump of a sister’s shoulder, absorbing their warmth. (As the second oldest of nineteen, she would have had many nooks to choose from.) She spoke Algonquin, prayed in Algonquin, dreamed in Algonquin—until the day a truck pulled up to their cabin in the bush and white men in black robes stepped out.
Nuns probably separated Marie-Louise from her brothers as soon as they arrived at the school. Genders mixed only on feast days. They lobbed off her braids and scrubbed her scalp with anti-lice shampoo. When she reached for her clothes, she was handed a uniform instead. Mass must have followed, along with a succession of classes taught in French, a language she hardly knew, and chores of all sorts: peeling potatoes, scouring pans, mopping floors, scrubbing toilets. After a bowl of gruel and a round of indecipherable prayers, she crawled into her first European-style cot in a dormitory lined with a hundred more. So many bodies, but none near enough for warmth.
“It was like the army,” Marie-Louise says, doubling the creases on her forehead. “‘Don’t go there, don’t touch, don’t speak your language, you must speak French.’”
Besides whispering with her sisters, Marie-Louise likely heard her mother tongue only at recess, when the nuns blasted Christian prayers in Algonquin, Atikamekw, and Cree through the loudspeakers in hopes that the children would later recite them to their parents. Occasionally she might have been asked to “play Indian” by donning a headdress and welcoming a chorus of singing missionaries for the school play. Beyond that, she probably reunited with her culture only during her brief visits home each summer. Over the years, her Algonquinness evaporated like a rare, essential oil.
“But we must go there,” she says. “We have no choice. They say we go to the fire, to the demon.”
Residential schools for First Nations and Inuit children began opening in Canada in the 1830s and became compulsory in the 1920s.6 The last didn’t close until 1996. While their mission evolved over the years from “civilizing” Aboriginal children to helping them better “integrate,” their tactics were invariably cruel. For speaking their native languages, children were beaten with clappers, rulers, whips, and cords. For other violations, they were locked in closets or forced to spend the night kneeling by their beds, their hands clasped in prayer. For simply being Indian, some were sterilized in Alberta and British Columbia. And for being isolated from their parents and separated from their siblings and bereft of any protection whatsoever, many were molested or raped. At least 4,100 children died at residential schools, often from diseases like tuberculosis, and thousands more ran away or committed suicide.7
Meeting an alumna, then, is like meeting a survivor8 of a concentration camp. You can’t help but stare with awe and horror, contemplating all she endured. Marie-Louise manages a few more sentences in English, then removes her glasses and wipes her eyes as I finish stacking the bags into her van.
“It’s a big, long walk with us, Catholicism,” she says quietly. “I reject it.”
; Then why, I ask, is she here?
“My grandmother. She was a believer. She was Catholic and she pray very much. I am here for the respect of my grandmother.”
And so, in a sense, am I.
KATERI’S INNER WORLD called her many things, too.
In the beginning: Tekakwitha, which has been translated as everything from “She Who Gathers Things Together” to “She Who Bumps into Things.” Once she started devoting all her time to the Jesuits, however, the names grew less affectionate. Lazy. Insolent. Traitor. Witch. Whore. Other Mohawks thought the young woman was blessed, however. They called her Kateri as the Jesuits did, enunciating each syllable with respect.
Three and a half centuries later, this division persists. I have met Mohawks who roll their eyes at Kateri, who dismiss her as a slutty opportunist. Who believe her canonization is a cynical gesture by the Catholic church to beg forgiveness for 500 years of transgressions—and to recruit more members while it’s at it. Who think Kateri is the very embodiment of colonization, and what self-respecting Indian would celebrate that?
Yet just as many Mohawks seem to think of Kateri as the reincarnation of Sky Woman on Earth, a prophet who is finally being recognized for her gifts. They don’t deny how badly their ancestors suffered under Christianity, but they believe they emerged from the experience more spiritually powerful than before. They see Kateri’s canonization as the Vatican legitimizing half a millennium of their faith.
To better understand this ideological split, I invite Darren Bonaparte to lunch in Akwesasne. A historian who runs the popular site WampumChronicles.com, he recently published a book about Kateri called A Lily among Thorns. Author photos usually show him in traditional regalia, but he walks through the doors of Twinleaf wearing a dark leather jacket, jeans, and sunglasses (that is, modern regalia). In his early forties, he still has a boyish face, dimpled and smooth, with a cautious grin.
His interest in history dates back to the casino war. His mother, Rosemary, was tribal chief at the time, the first woman to ever hold the position, but got voted out because of her anti-gambling stance. His best friend, meanwhile, got shot and killed during the final standoff. “It was a really confusing time, sitting up all night listening to gunfire. My boring little town was turned into Beirut. It was a wake-up call: You’re Indian; this means something. My first kid came along then, too. I had a baby; I couldn’t walk around with hate in my heart. I let that fuel my desire to learn.”
His studies gave him a special appreciation for the spiritual world his ancestors envisioned. Like their creation story, which opens with the Sky People, a matriarchal society that dwelled in the farthest stretches of blue. After bickering with her husband, a pregnant woman fell from a hole in the sky and landed on the back of a turtle. Clenched in her fists were seeds from the sky tree she had grabbed moments before tumbling. Sky dirt was embedded in her fingernails. She spread these artifacts as she walked about the new world, breathing Earth into being, plant by plant. Sky Woman was the first human inhabitant; her baby girl, the second. Not only did these stories give rise to a society where women are highly valued, they also led to elaborate ceremonies celebrating the individual contributions of all living things, from fish and berries to thunder and streams.
“Then the Europeans came with their guns and diseases, and that rich culture went into the Dark Ages. But there was a watershed moment when the French were out there burning their villages and the Mohawks said, ‘Hey, let’s stop fighting these guys.’ And then in the ritualized life, the Mohawks realized, ‘Hey, these people might be funny-looking, but they are bringing back this sophisticated life we used to have.’”
The Jesuits, meanwhile, marveled at the similarities between Native spirituality and their own. After learning enough Mohawk to decipher their creation story, they decided that Immaculate Conception and transubstantiation fit right in. “Christianity was just added to an existing culture,” Darren says. “It’s not like they emptied out a bucket and filled it with something else. The bucket was already full. They just stuck a crucifix in it. Kateri just followed what was already programmed in her mind.”
“Like beating herself to a pulp?”
“Could be,” he muses, flipping open a menu. “The Mohawks learned that Christ suffered without crying out, and that was what our warriors traditionally did when they got captured. We would taunt our tormentors: ‘Is that the best you can do?’ So when Christian Indians found out about flagellation, it became a fad. They would be like, ‘What do you think would hurt more, fire or ice?’”
The Jesuits didn’t encourage mortification among their young Indian converts, Darren stresses. They only wanted to baptize them, preferably before they died of smallpox. They never imagined an Indian could attain true holiness—until they met Kateri. She challenged their entire understanding of Native people. When they caught her pummeling herself to unconsciousness, they could only stare.
“At the end of the day, something profoundly supernatural took place, and they were very honest in how they wrote about it. It wasn’t a propaganda piece; they considered themselves to be witness to something. It was like a sequel to the Bible. They were seeing the bride of Jesus,” Darren says. “Yet that is what killed Kateri. They were not keeping close enough watch.”
I ask about his personal relationship with Catholicism. He smirks. “Catholicism was how my mom tortured us.”
Forced to rise for Mass every Sunday of his childhood, he rebelled in his teenage years. A class on the Old Testament turned him into a “flaky Jesus freak” in college, however, and he eventually returned to the church. Kateri was merely an image on his mother’s wall until he moved away from Akwesasne in his twenties and realized she was “a Native thing.” His interest deepened when his mother attended a healing mass featuring a relic of Kateri. “She was blessed with it, and her whole body lit up like a Christmas tree.”
That’s when he started pouring over translations of seventeenth-century texts about Kateri. “What really endears people to her is when they find out how much time she spent alone, in isolation, because everyone feels alone, deep down. Kateri never had children and she died young, so she is always a daughter, always an eternal child.”
Some 300 books have already been written about Kateri over the centuries, but Darren decided to add one more to offer a modern Mohawk perspective.
“There’s been a lot of idiotic coverage of Kateri, with headlines that say, ‘She Traded Her Totem Pole for a Crucifix.’ Some say she is a symbol of colonization, but no: she is a symbol of the failure of colonization. It killed her, but she ended up with the last word because she still has a positive effect on people today. She overcame and conquered death. Colonization, as bad as it was, we survived it.”
Our food arrives: a burger for Darren, a wrap for me. As we eat, he expresses amazement that Kateri’s day has finally come.
“I didn’t think she’d ever be canonized. I thought it would open up a can of worms for the Catholic church; we’d have to read about the French burning our villages, about smallpox. But it turns out, they did want to open the worms.”
He chews thoughtfully for a minute before uttering what’s fast becoming a refrain.
“I’m just glad my mom could see it in her lifetime. That’s really why I wrote the book, as a way of acknowledging her.”
MASS HAS ENDED IN KAHNAWAKE. As the pilgrims from the gym spill into the cafeteria, I hurry down the road back to the Mission of Saint Francis Xavier, where pilgrims fill the courtyard and camera crews swarm the periphery. Men in feathered kastowa are especially targeted for interviews. “What does it mean?” they are asked, microphones in their faces. “How does it feel?”
Swerving through the crowd, I enter the vestibule. Someone hands me a prayer card featuring Kateri’s most vaunted image: the 1690 oil painting by Father Chauchetière. Kateri stands on the banks of the St. Lawrence River shrouded in a blanket, pointy shoes on her feet. One hand clutches her heart; the other, a crucifix. Her expression is
pained yet peaceful.
A crush of pilgrims line up to visit her crypt: Mohawks, Filipinos, Taiwanese, Nigerians, Francophones, Anglophones, monks, nuns, Peacekeepers. I slip in behind a tall woman who turns to smile at me. In her early forties, she has long black hair and indigo eyes. I ask where she’s from and she says Hamburg. “As in Germany?” I ask. She nods. Growing up, she says, her mother always told her she looked like Kateri. When she got older, she met someone who worked at an Indian center who confirmed it. “I’ve been praying to Kateri ever since.”
By all historical accounts, Kateri was a pitiful sight. In addition to the scarring from smallpox, brandings, and switches, she barely stood four and a half feet tall. She hobbled when she walked, partly from injury, partly from half-blindness. This woman, on the other hand, has a ballerina build and flawless, porcelain skin. But perhaps, in her mind, resembling a Mohawk saint denotes an earthy exoticism. Or an angelic aura. Or a set of enviable cheekbones.
The crypt is ten feet away now, its marble so white it gleams. A wooden statue of Kateri towers above it wearing a headdress of beads. Rivers of calla lilies and snapdragons pool at her feet. As pilgrims approach the crypt, they hand an object over to a man wading in the floral arrangements. Bibles, rosaries, scarves, crucifixes, scapulars. He accepts them one by one, presses them against the tomb for an extended moment, then passes them back as newly minted fifth-degree relics. I scavenge through my bag for something to bless. Notebook, tissues, wallet, a tampon. The lady from Hamburg removes a cross from around her neck and hands it over with reverence. Water bottle, cough drops, camera, another tampon. The man looks at me expectantly. I glance around for ideas and see a Filipino clutching the prayer card distributed at the vestibule. I hand mine over too. Accepting it with a nod, the man thwacks it over the tomb like a quick game of slapjack while I try to imagine what I imagine everyone else is imagining, that the bones inside the crypt have been informed of their elevated status and are doing a celebratory jig, that whatever vessel contains them has acquired a celestial glow, that the crypt itself is now as consecrated as the host and can therefore transform Bibles and rosaries and scarves and crucifixes and scapulars and prayer cards into reliquaries the same way water turns to wine turns to blood and bread turns to body turns to Christ. The man hands back my prayer card and I wish to think It’s warmer! the same way I wish to have chatted with the miracle tree back in Concepcion and collapsed in rapture back in Robstown, because wouldn’t that make everything immeasurably more reassuring, constantly finding affirmations of a realm beyond your own?
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