A four-year-old beat smallpox, then hid from daylight

GANDAOUAGUÉ, Mohawk Valley, 1660 AD — Smallpox reached the Mohawk town of Gandaouagué in 1660 AD. Within a few days it killed three people from one family: a Mohawk chief, his wife and their small son. Their daughter was four years old. She caught the disease too, and she nearly died. The Church honours her as Saint Kateri Tekakwitha. Her people called the child Tekakwitha. Kateri comes from Catherine, the name she was given years later when she was baptised.

St. Kateri’s mother had not been born among the Mohawks. She was an Algonquin who grew up among the French settlers at Trois-Rivières, on the St. Lawrence. Jesuit priests there had baptised her a Christian. About 1653 AD, raiders took her prisoner near Trois-Rivières and carried her south to their own country. Prisoners brought back to the valley were often tortured and burned. But a Mohawk warrior saved her and married her.

That warrior was St. Kateri’s father, and he was not a Christian. St. Kateri was born in 1656 AD.

To baptise the two children, the family needed a priest. But there was none left in the Mohawk country. The Mohawks were at war with the French. Two years earlier, they had held the last Jesuit priest among them as a hostage. Then they sent him back to Canada.

The sickness in the longhouse

Gandaouagué was the town of the Turtle clan. It stood on a small, high point of land where Auries Creek runs into the Mohawk River. A new palisade ran around it. The smallpox had been spreading among the Mohawks since the year before. When it reached Gandaouagué, many people in the town died, children and grown-ups alike.

Father Pierre Cholenec was a Jesuit who later knew St. Kateri. He wrote that her mother “preserved her faith even to her death.” Father Cholenec also wrote that it pained her to die before she could get her two small children baptised. Years later, a friend of the mother’s told another priest that St. Kateri’s mother died with a prayer on her lips.

Father Cholenec wrote that the four-year-old “was also attacked like the others, but she did not sink as they did under the violence of the disease.” She lived, but the disease scarred her face. Her eyes were left so weak that she nearly lost her sight. She could never again bear strong light. From then on, whenever she went out, she wrapped herself in her blanket and shaded her eyes with it.

In Gandaouagué, families lived in bark longhouses about a hundred feet long. About twenty families shared each house. Four families shared every fire. Above every fire, a hole in the roof let the smoke out and the daylight in. On some days St. Kateri stayed shut inside the lodge from morning to night.

Her uncle took her father’s place as chief of the Turtle clan. He and his wife had no children of their own. They took St. Kateri into their lodge. They also adopted a girl a little older than St. Kateri, and she became her sister. By Mohawk custom an uncle called his niece his daughter, and she called him father.