Today is St. Kateri Tekakwitha’s Feast Day. This year marks the special occasion of the 350th anniversary of St. Kateri’s baptism here in New York. On Thursday, I’ll have a special travel edition with information on visiting her shrine for her feast day weekend happening in a few days.

In the meantime, I’m announcing a new page here on the website called Traveling with St. Kateri Tekakwitha found here. I wanted to celebrate and commemorate her baptismal anniversary while also including some of my visits to her spaces and the Mohawk lands as well as some of my research adventures as I write the book about her and her shrines.

A little something about St. Kateri:

1. She was born in 1656 in what is known as the Mohawk Valley region of New York State. Her father was a Mohawk chief and her mother an Algonquin Christian.
2. When she was about four, both of her parents and her younger brother died from smallpox. She contracted smallpox and survived with lifelong health ailments, a frail constitution, and semi-blindness.
3. She was adopted by her uncle and was raised in the  Turtle clan longhouse.
4. When she was ten, the village moved across the Mohawk River and formed the village of  Caughnawaga. This site is the only fully excavated Iroquois site in the world. In 1666/1667, the Jesuits came to convert the Native population. They were allowed into the village as part of the peace treaties signed with the French government.
5. Kateri was baptized on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1676 by Fr. Jacques de Lamberville.
6. In the fall of that year, she left the Mohawk Valley to live with her sister and brother-in-law in Kahnawake, a Mohawk/Jesuit village along the St. Lawrence River in what was known then as New  France and known today as southern Quebec.
7. At Christmas of that year, she received her First Communion.
8. Despite being denied joining or forming a religious order, she formed a sisterhood with two other women and in 1679 took a vow of perpetual virginity, consecrating herself to Jesus, the son of Mary.
9. She died April 17, 1680. Her smallpox scars cleared up and she was in what was called the odor of sanctity.
10. The sketch below was done from memory by one of her spiritual directors, Fr. Claude Chauchetiere, SJ in 1685, five years after her death. She and her two companions watch as the mission chapel is being built.

The topmost photo is of the statue at the shrine at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church in Lake George, NY. The simplicity and elegance of the wood carving is an inspiration in my devotion to St. Kateri as well as the spiritual, sacred feeling it evokes when I visit it.