Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits Nancy Shoemaker Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. Allan Greer. Toronto: Oxford, 2005. Pp. 249, illus. $48.00 In the past decade, Allan Greer has published several excellent articles on Jesuit-Native relations in seventeenth-century New France, and so I expected that the book reportedly in progress would also be very good. It is more than good, however, and surpasses all my expectations. Mohawk Saint fully and intricately illuminates the meaning of Christianity to Tekakwitha and Tekakwitha's meaning to the Jesuits who knew her; without doubt it will stand as the definitive treatment of Tekakwitha for years to come. [End Page 704] Greer organizes his history as a dual biography of Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuit missionary most enchanted with her mysticism, Claude Chauchetière. The story begins with Tekakwitha's death, which Greer frames as the turning point for both of them. For Tekakwitha, her death ended her life as an Iroquois woman and heralded her rise as a Catholic celebrity endowed with extraordinary spiritual powers. Chauchetière found in Tekakwitha's death acknowledgement of his choice to commit his life to God and Canada. Subsequent chapters document the diverse childhoods of Tekakwitha and Chauchetière to highlight how remarkable it was that two such different people – in their daily work routines, familial relationships, and spiritual understandings – could come to share mystical experiences and find their own unique meaning and purpose in what was purportedly the same religion, Christianity. Greer then shows how in Tekakwitha's brief time at Kahnawake – the Christian Indian community located next to the mission of the Sault and near Montreal – Chauchetière and his Jesuit colleague Pierre Cholenec gradually singled her out from a host of penitential, self-mortifying women, commending Tekakwitha for her serious, humble demeanour and her status (or likely status) as an Indian virgin. The book ends with the memory and continuing significance of Tekakwitha among Catholic devotees in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I fear it is impossible to convey to readers the many subtle profundities of Greer's analysis, but I will try. One strength of his study is that he has made use of many records, particularly Chauchetière's private correspondence and papers, heretofore not extensively studied. More significantly, however, Greer closely dissects the well-known texts to discern patterns and contradictions. A particularly interesting aspect of Tekakwitha's hagiographic depictions that Greer teases out is the tension between the categories of 'Indian' and 'Catholic' and how the tension took different forms over time and varied among Catholic constituencies. In comparing Cholenec's restraint and distortion in dealing with Tekakwitha's potential saintliness, in contrast to Chauchetière's exuberant willingness to believe, Greer is able to show the contradictions embedded in the Jesuits' Christianizing mission. The Jesuits' ideal of celibacy and purity conflicted with their sense of Canada as a wild land one step removed from hell, inhabited by sauvages and cannibals. Tekakwitha became the lynchpin symbol in this struggle between the two poles – the Jesuit sense of the ideal self, and the horrors they perceived as constituting the antagonist against which they struggled. Centuries later, 'modern' Catholics transformed Tekakwitha imagery by placing her in a romanticized natural environment, a kind of transcendental Catholicism, in which nature and thus Indians promised spiritual uplift as innocents. Whereas Greer describes how some Catholic Indians have found in [End Page 705] Tekakwitha a symbol for a syncretic Catholic faith that can incorporate Indian spirituality and ceremony, interestingly at Kahnawake and other Indian communities, Tekakwitha evokes more ambivalence as a symbol of assimilation for whom European colonization led to cultural seduction and loss of a distinct Indian identity. There is much more to the book, and I encourage all to read it. Not only is it an intellectual masterpiece of scholarship and insight, it is also beautifully written and a thoroughly engaging story. Nancy Shoemaker University of Connecticut Copyright © 2005 University of Toronto Press