Feast of Kateri Tekakwitha, July 14

Biographical details are sparse for this Patron Saint of the Environment: daughter of a Mohawk chief and a Christian, Algonquin mother, Kateri was orphaned when her family was wiped out by the smallpox epidemic of 1660, which left her pock-marked and half blind. Adopted by her uncle, she asked for baptism at age 20, and celebrated it in a chapel festively decorated with feathers, ribbons, flowers, and beads.

The Mohawks, however, could not accept her conversion and ridiculed her. Eventually she made a long journey on foot to the Sault mission south of Montreal in Canada, where she could live among other Native American Christians. Early French biographers describe her as solid and joyful. She nursed the sick and dying with remarkable cheer, considering that her own health was precarious. Her joy was so contagious that children were drawn to her for storytelling. She showed a key hallmark of holiness: people wanted to be around her. At her burial there was no mourning, only public rejoicing.

Beyond the brief biography, Kateri stands as a larger symbol for the reverence and repair our environment desperately needs. Thomas Berry in The Dream of the Earth underscores the significance of Native Americans to a country that seems aggressively bent on destroying the earth, greedily exploiting its natural resources. The environmental damage goes back to the first European settlers who saw themselves as “lordly rulers of the continent,” (p. 189) who could dominate it at will. Instead of meeting the indigenous cultures with curiosity and delight, wondering what native people could teach, these pioneers called them “savages” needing redemption. Berry terms this “our compulsive savior instincts. We take up the burden of saving others even when in fact we destroy them.” (p. 182)

In the five centuries since the European invasion of the continent, the native tribes suffered physically but won “a moral victory of unique dimensions.” (p. 183) Their spiritual tradition, which might be called a nature mysticism, is exactly what we need now to revitalize our attitudes about our land, seas, forests, and rivers if they are to survive horrific pollution. When clean air and wilderness are dangerously threatened, the Native American approach which regards them as sacred might save the planet. (For more on that topic, see Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.) In contrast to the lordly rulers of the continent, who could do as they pleased with its resources, Kateri and her people teach “the art of communion with the earth.” In an ironic reversal, “we need their mythic capacity for relation to this continent more than they need our capacity for mechanistic exploitation.” (p. 190)

Kateri and her people understood how human life is physically and spiritually interwoven with the water, sun and soil that sustain us. They appreciated how the splendor of land and sea inspires our sense of the divine. In desperate, last-ditch circumstances now, we need Kateri’s sensitivity to the needs of rivers, waters and valleys, knowing that to extinguish a species is to silence a divine voice, to degrade our habitat is to degrade ourselves.