ABSTRACT
L a gracia triunfante en la vida de Catharina Tegakovita, india iroquesa was published in Mexico City in 1724. 1 The bulk of the book consists of a long hagiographic text translated from the French and recounting the life, death, and postmortem “glories” of Catherine Tekakwitha, an Iroquois of the Mohawk tribe born in 1656 in what is now northern New York. Sometime enemies of the French, the Mohawks admitted Jesuit missionaries to their midst in the 1660s and 1670s, with the result that many converted to Christianity and moved to a mission settlement near Montreal. Tekakwitha, a sickly and reclusive teenage girl, was among them, embarking on her trek northward only after suffering persecution at the hands of her “pagan” fellow villagers. Once installed in the Jesuit-sponsored mission of Kahnawake, she joined a group of young women who had renounced sex and marriage in favor of a life of religious perfection. Tekakwitha’s “penances” (fasting, self-flagellation, sleep deprivation, etc.) were particularly severe, her dreams and visions exceptionally illuminating. She died in 1680 at age twenty-four and, beginning almost immediately after her death, she became the object of a cult among Native and French-Canadian Catholics. The book catalogs her virtues, dramatizes her trials and tribulations as a Christian among pagans, dwells on her edifying death, and reports on the postmortem apparitions and miraculous cures indicative of saintly status. Although she was never canonized, Tekakwitha’s life narra tive bears all the marks of a classic hagiographic text. 2
