![]() After her death, her disfigured face, ravaged by childhood smallpox, miraculously turned white. He manages to honour the influence of both priests and clan mothers in her life.Ĭatherine 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. 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.”īiographer-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. ![]() ![]() (Originally published in the October 2005 edition of The Literary Review of Canada) ![]() The Saintly Muse (Leonard Cohen, Allan Greer)Ĭonsidering a classic novel and a new biography of “the Blessed Catherine.” ![]()
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