COLONIE — Hundreds of Native Americans attending the 73rd annual Tekakwitha Conference swelled with cultural pride during the dramatic countdown to the Oct. 21 canonization in Rome of the young Native American and mystic who lived in the Mohawk Valley in the 17th century.
Kateri Tekakwitha will be the first Native American elevated to sainthood.
"To see a woman whose face looks like our faces given the highest honor by the Catholic Church is a source of deep cultural pride," said Julienne Montour, a high school art teacher in Taylor, Mich., who is a member of the Mohawk at Kahnawake community just outside Montreal, the same Canadian town where Kateri came of age.
For those attending the four-day conference — the first time it has been held in the Capital Region — the expressions of pride were not unlike those heard among African-Americans when Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009 and became the first African-American president in U.S. history.
"This is an affirmation of our culture as Native American Catholics," said Sister Kateri Mitchell, executive director of the Tekakwitha Conference located in Great Falls, Mont. She is a Sister of Saint Ann who taught at parochial schools across the Northeast, including at St. Joseph's in Cohoes, before she took over the leadership of a group that has spent decades praying for miracles and campaigning for Kateri Tekakwitha's canonization.
Mitchell was given the name Kateri in 1960, a year after she entered religious life. She grew up in the Akwesasne community of the Mohawk St. Regis tribe along the St. Lawrence River. Her tribe established a Catholic Church in 1725. Her parents were devotees of Kateri, and they often drove to Tekakwitha shrines in Fonda and Auriesville in Montgomery County.
"My dad loved Kateri and he let us miss Mass on Sunday if he took us on a Kateri pilgrimage," she recalled. "My parents prayed to Kateri their entire lives."
Kateri was born in 1656 in Ossernenon, now called Auriesville, a few miles west of Amsterdam. Her mother was a Christian Algonquin and her father was a Mohawk chief who died of smallpox when she was 4 years old — a disease that damaged the girl's eyesight and scarred her face.
Her mother and younger brother also died during the smallpox epidemic when she was a young girl. At age 10, her village was burned down by French forces.
She was given the name Tekakwitha, a native word denoting her poor vision. She defied Mohawk culture by refusing to marry and was further ostracized when she converted to Catholicism at age 20. Two years later, she fled to Canada and lived in a settlement of Christian Indians near Montreal. She led a dozen women who practiced asceticism and cared for children and the elderly in her village. She helped missionaries convert other Indians to Christianity. She is entombed inside the St. Francis-Xavier Church in Kahnawake, Canada.
Kateri died at 24. Witnesses who attended her death said her body glowed and the smallpox scars on her face disappeared. She was known as Lily of the Mohawks and miracles have been attributed to her on behalf of faithful supplicants who sought healing. Claims were vetted by Vatican investigators, and Pope Benedict XVI announced her canonization to sainthood after a lengthy process that included beatification in 1980.
Artist Giovanna Paponetti, an artist in Taos, N.M. who specializes in Kateri paintings and who published an illustrated book on her life, has been a devotee since her prayers to Tekakwitha were answered.
"I had two doctors who diagnosed me with an inoperable tumor," Paponetti said. "I prayed to Kateri and they were gone. So many of us have had miracles performed by Kateri."
Paponetti said a lesser miracle presented itself recently when she prayed to Kateri to find a way to afford to attend the canonization in the fall and a return to a country her father left at 15 for a new life in America. A generous donor stepped forward and will pay her airfare and travel expenses so she can make sketches and paintings of the events in Rome.
Paponetti was among more than 800 attendees of the conference at the Holiday Inn on Wolf Road. The event included Masses, prayer sessions, a large bazaar with Native American crafts for sale, several lectures and workshops on aspects of Kateri's life and pilgrimages to Tekakwitha shrines in Fonda and Auriesville.
Participants traveled from dozens of states across the country — about 200 were delayed in Chicago because of inclement weather that grounded flights — as well as Canada and as far as Australia. An estimated 500 of the attendees have already booked their flights to Rome for the canonization.
"Kateri gives Native Americans a wonderful role model and she erases negative stereotypes," Montour said. "We can put all our hopes and dreams and prayers into Kateri. She persevered through so many difficulties in her life. She gives hope to people who have lost hope."
There are an estimated 600,000 Native Americans who are Catholics across the U.S., according to Mitchell. In her church and at other parishes, Native American music, dance and other customs are incorporated into traditional Catholic Masses on certain feast days.
"There's a movement for integration and tolerance between Native ways and Catholic rituals," Mitchell said. "Kateri's canonization is an important historical moment. She is the face of our future church."
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Celebrating Kateri, Lily of the Mohawks
What: 73rd Annual Tekakwitha Conference
Where: Holiday Inn, Wolf Road
When: Through Saturday
Info: A sale of Native American crafts and Kateri religious material with dozens of vendors is held in the Phoenix Ballroom.