The Saintly Muse

Leonard Cohen’s narrator in Beautiful Losers begins his bizarre confession with a question: “Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you?” In almost the same breath, he asks, “Can I love you in my own way?” He later gives himself a task: “Catherine Tekakwitha, I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits.”

Biographer-historian Allan Greer in Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits comes to clarify late 17th-century Mohawk-Jesuit relations and place Tekakwitha, the first North American proposed for sainthood, in the context of her Iroquois heritage and her new-found Catholicism. He manages to honour the influence of both priests and clan mothers in her life.

Catherine Tekakwitha, the most thoroughly documented indigenous person of the Americas in the colonial period, was by many accounts—both Jesuit and Native—a saint, if not a Saint. After her death, her disfigured face, ravaged by childhood smallpox, miraculously turned white. Mysterious...