About 20-25 miles from Schenectady, New York, are the Indian lands known as the Osserneon now called Auriesville. Schenectady was settled in 1661 and it was always in the midst of Indian conflicts. The major tribes from the Schenectady area to the area of Quebec, Canada were the Algonquin Indians, Huron Indians, Iroquois Indians, and the noted Mohawk Indians. It was into these Indian regions that Jesuits came from France in about the 1640’s. There were eight Jesuits that are known as the Jesuit Martyrs of North America; Antony Daniel, Charles Garnier, Noel Chabanel, Isaac Jogues, John LaLande, John de Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, and Rene Goupil.
We connect Isaac Jogues, Jesuit Priest, and Rene Goupil and John Lalande, two Jesuit laymen, with the events at Auriesville. These men were sent to work among the Mohawks at Auriesville. In 1642, Isaac Jogues and Rene Goupil were captured in Auriesville and Rene took the vows as a Jesuit Brother from Isaac Jogues while both were being tortured. Rene Goupil was tomahawked for teaching the sign of the cross to an Indian child. Isaac Jogues buried him in a ravine in Auriesville. Isaac Jogues escaped, but three years later came back to Auriesville with John Lalande. On October 18, 1646, Jogues was tomahawked, and Lalande was tomahawked the next day.
Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656, the daughter of a native Algonquin-Christian mother and a Mohawk warrior father. The family lived in Osserneon, or Auriesville. Tekakwitha was left orphaned at the age of four, when her mother, father, and baby brother were stricken by a smallpox epidemic which ravaged the tribe in 1659 and 1660. Tekakwitha was also stricken with the dread disease and was left with facial pock-marks and weakened eyesight, physical infirmities which were to plague her for life. Her uncle, chief of the neighboring village where she was taken and raised in accordance with ancestral beliefs, adopted her. Although Tekakwitha was not baptized as an infant, she had fond memories of her good and prayerful mother and of the stories of Christian faith that her mother shared with her in childhood. These remained indelibly impressed upon her mind and heart and were to give shape and direction to her life’s destiny. At the age of eight, in keeping with tribal custom, Kateri was paired by her foster parents with a boy of the same age with a view towards eventual marriage. Kateri, however, made it clear that she did not want to marry, but desired to give her life to the great Manitou (that is, the true God), to whom she prayed frequently in the quiet of the wooded area near her village. Tekakwitha had only a superficial contact with Christianity during her childhood.
In 1674, however, when Tekakwitha was 18, Father James de Lamberville, S.J. established a permanent mission in the village and inaugurated a catechumentae program. Despite intense pressures from her foster parents and other villagers, Kateri zealously pursued initiation to the Christian life, and on Easter Sunday, 1676, she was baptized and given the name Kateri, the Iroquois word for the Christian name, Catherine. This event of joining the religion of the white man only intensified the ridicule, calumny, and hostility to which she was subjected by family and community alike, to the extent that her life was threatened so that in 1677, upon the advice of Father de Lamberville, and with the assistance of three Christian catechumens, she escaped from her homeland and migrated north to Caughnawaga, Canada, a Christian settlement where she was able to practice her religion in more tranquil surroundings.
Her virtue flourished in her new surroundings under the direction of the Jesuit fathers. On Christmas Day 1677, only 20 months after her baptism, Kateri was privileged to receive the Eucharist for the first time. According to sacramental practice of the 17th century this was an unusual privilege to receive the two sacraments within such a short time. Kateri lived just three years after this, spending most of her time caring for the sick and the elderly in the village. In 1679, with the permission of her spiritual director, she made a vow of perpetual virginity; according to her biographers she was the first woman of the Iroquois Nation to bind herself to such a commitment. However, the poor health which plagued her throughout life consumed her with violent pain and effected her death in 1680 at the tender age of 24.” Her life had been one of perpetual virginity, prayer and penance. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980 and has the distinction of being the first Native American beatified by the Catholic Church.
When I was growing up, and the weather was right, Mom would declare that our family was going to Sunday Mass at Auriesville. That meant it also involved a picnic. As a young boy, I would be permitted to go into the ravine, usually with a companion. There we would explore the stream that runs through the ravine, the stream in which Rene Goupil was first dumped into by the Indians. Our children’s imaginations would soar. We were there with Saints Isaac Jogues and Rene Goupil. We were there with Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha.
Water from a well in the ravine at Auriesville, after being blessed, was available for visitors to take home, something I always did after each visit, even into my adult life. On a personal note, that Blessed Water was infused with the Baptismal Water of St. Agnes Catholic Church, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and used for the Baptism of my twin grandaughters, Anna Claire and Caroline Gallo. My prayer is that as the twins grow in age, they can look to the model of inspiration in Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks.
Endnote: History of Auriesville and Katrina was taken in part measure from the public documents at Auriesville.