“Exploring Tekakwitha’s life and narrative within the discourse of historical and personal trauma creates an intersection of both the historical record of Iroquoian experience and the principles of Iroquoian creation narratives and the Condolence rites so central to Iroquoian perspectives. These factors must be taken seriously in any interpretation of Native response to Christianity”

Palmer 277

I notice three eighteenth-century British literature connections when reading the Bonaparte, Palmer and Shoemaker readings to investigate further into the life of indigenous saint Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s life. These connections might help to explain either shared “bridge” traditions between Catholocism and Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s  culture of her birth and upbringing or distortions to which the Catholic “witnesses” to her life and her posthumous miracles testify in order to assimilate her into their culture and thereby to assist in the colonial goals of furthering empire through cultural genocide or, as the poem at the beginning of Palmer puts it, “survivors of The Cleansing” (Palmer 267). Or perhaps a combination; for colonialism, like Lovelace’s tactics in Richardson’s Clarissa, propagates via a mixture of truth and lies. 

The first trans-Atlantic continuity I notice in the colonialist expansion underlying life writing regarding, but not by, Káteri Tekahkwí:tha and other British eighteenth-century literature of the colonial period that I would like to think about is: “… but [Katharine’s] 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 …” (Bonaparte), Darren Bonaparte quotes her life/death chronicler, Father Pierre, as saying. Literally the miracle is that she becomes white. This conversion narrative is not without precedent. This white Christian fantasy of turning the body of darker outsiders, mainly Muslims, dates back at least to the Crusades. The medieval romance titled “The King of Tars” for instance contains the Muslim Sultan’s “miraculous” conversion from black to white. He then shifts sides in the Crusades to start killing not Christians but Muslims, and is equated to an animal through the language regarding his killing rampage. 

Another trans-Atlantic continuity occurs between Kateri’s malnourished state and “sweet” odor of “sanctity” and that of Richardson’s Clarissa. “Kateri was small to begin with … and malnourished from frequent fasting” (Bonaparte) and “Kateri Tekakwitha died at Kahnawake in 1680 in the odor of sanctity (a sweet odor filled the room)” (Shoemaker 49). Both of these quotes from Bonaparte and Shoemaker respectively show aspects of the death of Clarissa, the insanely popular novel by the most popular novelist of eighteenth-century Britain, Samuel Richardson. Clarissa dies after being raped and gaslighted by the rake, Lovelace. She dies in a state of anorexia as she refuses to eat and fantasies about her own death. When she dies, a sweet odor fills the room. She is compared to an “angel” frequently who cannot exist in this world. Clarissa is already white, but this work is part of the trans-Atlantic cultural “liberation” narrative. It also shows the effects of trauma, of being separated from her “father’s house” and taken into London and imprisoned. The need to make a colonized or entrapped woman into (1) in the case of Kateri white and (2) smell wonderful even upon death (both) shows in the fact that this is the case for both these real and fictional women. It shows the Catholic converters’ will to inscribe white, English, Protestant, feminine ideals of “virtue” in death upon the death of Káteri Tekahkwí:tha.

The gynocentric metaphor of the log house (Palmer 270) from Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s community of her birth has precedence within the Catholic faith as well; a continuity which colonialists, knowingly or unknowingly exploited to assist in her conversion. It sheds some light, as well, on the ways in which females could co-opt power in certain ways in the Christian church/community. One of these ways was to become a nun–one that was lost to Protestant Englishwomen during the eighteenth century so that they were placed into situations of entrapment, which Richardson as well as feminists such as Mary Astell wished to correct through “Protestant nunneries,” which never took off. Anyway–the log-house metaphor appears in a similar version by Lady Mary Sidney Herbert in her Renaissance-era translations of the Psalms. The womb is likened to a house and the ribs to rafters within the attic for the baby which resides therein. 

Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s life through her chronicled death can be further investigated into via the Condolence rights of her community, and how they intertwine with those of the Jesuit settlement in which she tortured herself and died on a bed of thorns. I would like to investigate more into Condolence rites of the Iroquois and am curious as to whether Tekakwitha’s inability to participate in the rites for her father, mother and village would have affected her trauma, what those rites were specifically as well as what the effect of them was to a people who did not conceive of “wrongdoing” and “good and evil” or “eternal fire where there was no wood”–and how were these rituals perhaps absorbed or contained into the rituals on Catholic conversion. 

Káteri Tekahkwí:tha related to Christian teachings not in spite of but through her Iroquois lens much like indigenous communities in New Spain appropriated various portions of the Catholic myth, and paying more attention and homage to the horse than to Santiago, in ways that the colonists weren’t expecting or couldn’t anticipate through their closed cultural lens. 

In Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s community of her birth, the way to process trauma and grief lies through a process of Condolence, in which the mourner accepts/permits the sympathy of those who wish to console them, according to Palmer. Through collective community ritual, one is consoled. It would be interesting to study Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s conversion story through her own words–however, the only words extant re: her life hail from those who ascribe the saint status to her through the historical record. She was venerated for her self-flagellation–the colonists praising the indigenous woman, torn from her family, for further punishing herself. I wonder if Tekakwitha was ever able to “accept/permit the sympathy” of anyone who wished to console her. 

Works Cited

Bonaparte, Darren. “A Lily among Thorns: The Mowak Repatriation of Káteri Tekahkwí:tha.” Presented at the 20th Conference on New York State History. Plattsburgh, New York: June 5, 2009. 

Palmer, Vera B. “The Devil in the Details: Controverting an American Indian Conversion Narrative,” Theorizing Native Studies, eds. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, pp. 267-296. Duke UP, 2014.

Shoemaker, Nancy. “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path to Sainthood,” Negotiations of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Routledge, 1995.