ABSTRACT
The Indian village at Kahnawake was perhaps the most successful of Christian “praying towns” in the New World. Founded in the late 1660s by a small group of Iroquois, Hurons, and Eries, the village was formally attached to the Jesuit Mission of St. Francis Xavier. For many Indians, especially the Iroquois, Kahnawake became a refuge from the rise in drinking, violence, and warfare that plagued many Indian villages in the northeast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Shoemaker’s essay focuses on the life of one Christian Indian woman, Kateri Tekakwitha, who lived at Kahnawake during the 1670s, when the Christian fervor within the village reached its peak. Today, the Catholic Church at Kahnawake Reserve in Canada houses Tekakwitha’s relics and continues to attract pilgrims who come to pray at her shrine.
