Kateri Tekakwitha Essay

The Mohawk religion, to begin with, was largely Animist and based on a primordial battle between evil and good. It was centered on the idea that creatures, places, and objects all tended to have some distinct spiritual essence. Many Mohawk still adhere to it. In the second quarter of the 17th century, French Jesuit missionaries converted many Mohawk to the Catholic faith. One prominent convert was Kateri Tekakwitha, who was the daughter of a chief’s daughter. Kateri Tekakwitha, who had been born at Ossernenon, accepted the Catholic faith and afterward devoted the remainder of her life to performing benevolence and charity works amongst her people. “Kateri” is the Iroquois version of Catherine, which was her baptismal name, and means pure. “Tekakwitha,” on the other hand, means placing things in order. Thus, her name epitomized her life’s mission for which she is today remembered. The Vatican later in the 1940s bestowed on Kateri the title Venerable, which in the Latin rite is
Many Mohawk adopted this combination of dressing. According to Bonvillain, the Mohawks traditionally produced their clothing using furs harvested from the woodlands, which comprised of deer and elk hides, corn husks, as well as plant and tree fibers that they wove together. Later, animal gut or sinews were cleaned and readied as threads for garments. Footwear was sewed with sharp leg bones or porcupine quills. The Mohawks also obtained clothing dyes from tree barks, berries, grasses, and flowers. Older villagers and adults often handed down durable clothing to others in their families as honors or gifts or because they had outgrown them. The Mohawk clothing closely resembled that of the other tribes that were part of the Confederacy although they retained much of their originality as the basis for they style they pursued