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This chapter explores the cult of Kateri Tekakwitha, the Mohawk maiden whose tremendous spiritual discipline (which included daily self-flagellation with tree branches, hot coals, and thorns) convinced Jesuit missionaries that Indians could be “holy” too. Since dying at age 24 in 1680, she—like Mother Julia in South Texas—hasn’t had a moment’s rest: she’s been causing miracles around the St. Lawrence River Valley (and beyond) ever since. In October 2012, she was canonized a Saint by the Vatican—the first Native American ever to be so. More than a thousand Mohawks flew to Rome to bear witness. In this chapter, the author joins the thousand who descended upon Kahnawake, the Mohawk Nation just south of Montreal, Quebec, where Kateri is buried, instead. There, at the Mission of Saint Francis Xavier, she meets an Algonquin woman who graduated from Indian Residential School and learns about the brutal legacies of Catholicism on Mohawk land.

This chapter uses onomastics, the study of names, to compare the intersecting stories of two women who lived in the Iroquois-Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake. The Iroquoian concept of requickening may lend insight into how Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, may have modelled her life after her baptismal namesake, St. Catherine of Siena. The Jesuits’ choice of Marguerite, after St. Margaret of Antioch, as a new baptismal name for John Williams’s captive daughter Eunice may have been intended as an allusion to her rescue from heresy. Her eventual marriage to a Mohawk man fulfilled her Mohawk name, Kanenstenhawi, just as Kateri Tekakwitha’s vow of chastity fulfilled her Christian one.

Four captivity narratives set in the Great Lakes region during the second half of the eighteenth century feature scenes in which Native Americans present the authors with books. These book presentations were symbolic interactions, in which the Indians affirmed their recognition of the value of books to the colonists. When the adopted captive James Smith lost his books, he feared for his life; by finding them and restoring them to him, his Kahnawake Mohawk kin paradoxically enabled his immersion in their society. For the diplomat Thomas Morris, who was detained by Miamis, and Thomas Ridout and Charles Johnston, who were both captured by Shawnees, their books facilitated their participation in secular literary culture. For Morris and Ridout, especially, the books furnished striking allegorical parallels to their experiences.