Saints and Colonizers: Taking The Perspective Of The Marginalized

Today marks a special day in the church calendar for me. It is the feast of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman from upstate New York, who became the first Native American saint. Our adult daughter is named Kateri (named quite a while before sainthood was pronounced), and this feast day was always a special day on our home calendar.

Some of you may be familiar with the story of Kateri or may have even been to Kateri’s shrine in Fonda, NY. If you are not familiar, the gist of the story is that Kateri was born (near present day Auriesville, NY) in 1656 to a Mohawk chief and a Christian Algonquin woman (who had been captured in a raid and assimilated into the Mohawk people). Her parents both died of smallpox when she was 4, and Kateri herself contracted the disease. She was left with multiple scars and blurred vision and her Mohawk given name, Tekakwitha, means “she who bumps into things” (likely due to her poor vision). She was adopted by relatives who were members of the Turtle Clan.

At the age of 13, she declined her culturally prescribed marriage and, instead, professed a faith in Jesus as her partner. At the age of 18, she began to study theology with a Jesuit missionary and adopted many of the beliefs and practices of the Catholic church (supposedly rejecting many of the practices of her Mohawk kin). She died in 1680 at the age of 23 or 24.

In 2012 Pope Benedict XVI canonized Kateri Tekakwitha, making her the first-ever North American Indigenous saint.

Of course, there’s a lot more to the story, but as a saint, Kateri has been held up as a “model” for the faithful (and, by implication, for Indigenous peoples). But this story is one that requires a good deal of unpacking.

Jean-Francois Roussel, a Canadian professor at the University of Montreal’s Institute of Religious Studies, wrote a book in 2022 that highlights some of this story from a “postcolonial” point of view – one that considers an Indigenous reading of the Kateri story.  The result is that it challenges some of our traditional understandings and offers us a different perspective on her life and the story that we have inherited.

Let’s keep this in mind as we read our scriptures…

In the first reading today, we hear from Exodus 1 (the church cites verses 8-14; 22). In this passage, the Egyptian leader notices that the Hebrew people who are living in his land are multiplying in number. He says, “Look how numerous and powerful the people of the children of Israel are growing, more so than we ourselves! Come, let us deal shrewdly with them to stop their increase…” He then develops a plan to enslave the Israelites and force them into hard labor.

A part that is left out of today’s reading – but I think is CENTRAL to the text – comes in Exodus 1: 15-21. In it, two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, are told by the Egyptian king that when they are assisting at Israelite births, they are to kill the boys and spare the girls. The midwives do not comply, however, and make up an excuse that the Isarelite women give birth so fast that the babies are born before the midwives even get there! Pharaoh then gives an order that all male babies are to be killed (and that’s how we are led into the story of Moses being put into a basket so that he is spared being killed…).

Let’s just pause for a moment because there’s a WHOLE LOT going on in this text that we should probably pay attention to.

First, we have a narrative emerging in the Egyptian empire that these “foreigners” (the Israelites) are having a lot of babies, and fear is growing in Egypt that they will outnumber and grow more powerful than the ruling class.

Doesn’t that sound like a storyline that we’re hearing today in our country. What if we changed the word Egyptian to “American” and Israelite to “Latino/a.” We’d have the same story, wouldn’t we? 

And then Shiphrah and Puah, the two midwives who some have called the first people in the bible to engage in civil disobedience, defy orders and align with the oppressed. They do not honor the wishes of the “king” of Egypt. They serve a higher calling than the wishes of the king.

Just take all that in for a minute. What does that get you thinking about?

And what, you may be asking, does this have to do with St. Kateri?

Our scriptural tradition is somewhat unique because it takes the vantage point of the marginalized (versus taking the vantage point of empire). So in today’s reading from Exodus, we hear the fear and danger that the Israelites felt and not the official party line and policy of Egypt which would have extolled the dangers of foreigners and the need to remove/limit/control them. 

As Christians, our tradition picks up this perspective, and we hear Jesus and the early church align with those who are oppressed and marginalized by the systems and workings of empire.

But what if I told you that, in our modern context, we’re probably MORE aligned with Egypt than we are with the Israelites.

Wait…what?

If you’re living in the United States and do not have Indigenous ancestry, then you are probably more like “Egypt” than you are like the “Israelites” – at least with respect to this part of your identity. And if you are white, or middle/upper class, and heterosexual, able-bodied, educated (with a bachelor’s degree or higher), and cis-gender (meaning your gender identify corresponds to what was assigned at birth), then you are also probably more like “Egypt” than you are like the “Israelites.”

This may be a challenge to take in, but just sit with it for a minute.

But with respect to settler status…any time we hear a story that holds up values that align with the settlers – like the story of St. Kateri where she “rejected” her traditional ways and adopted those of the colonizing culture – we might want to pause and ask a few questions.

As professor Jean-Francois Roussel notes, 

Kateri is praised for her piety and obedience to the Catholic faith (the faith of the colonizers who literally burned her village and killed some of her extended family in 1666). He goes on to say that her loss of vision and physical disfigurement were the direct result of smallpox (which was intentionally introduced by colonial powers), and that the only testimonies of her life are provided by two Jesuit missionaries who knew her (there are no first hand accounts of her beliefs and reflections).  Among other things, he notes that her history also curiously mirrors that of the purpose of the Indian residential schools whereby Indigenous people were taught (and violently coerced) to “embrace” the values, lifestyle and faith of the colonial powers. 

Now it is possible that Kateri accepted everything that the Jesuit missionaries wrote about what she believed. And, no doubt, she was a bridge-builder between very different cultures. But just as we’d want to be cautious if we were reading an Egyptian account of the story of the Israelites, we need to be very careful as we read the colonial story of an Indigenous woman.

For example, would we hold Kateri up as a “saint” if she had rejected the Catholic faith and instead remained true to traditional ways? Would we hold her up as an example if she had defied the colonial powers and worked against them? Would we still honor her if she were part of the Indigenous resistance movement?

I saw a meme the other day that said,

“You watched ‘Star Wars’ and sided with the resistance…
You watched ‘The Matrix’ and sided with the resistance…
You watched ‘V for Vendetta’ and sided with the resistance…
When it’s fiction, you side with the resistance, but in real life you fail to see the oppression in your midst…”

In our gospel today from Matthew 10, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword…”

Jesus does not mean that he has come to bring violence but that his presence will bring about conflict because he will side with the resistance IN REAL LIFE. He WILL side with those who have been left out, marginalized, oppressed, neglected and harmed. And he will be sure to make sure that their perspective and story is told. I also hear Jesus’ words along the lines of what Martin Luther King said in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” when he said, that, “We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive”.

For me, this is part of what makes the gospel so inspiring and so difficult. It ever asks us to keep bringing to the surface the tensions in our midst and aligning ourselves with the perspective and lived experiences of those who are being left out – in real life. And the more privilege one has in this equation, the harder it gets to “hear” the gospel let alone feel bold enough to act on it.

As many of you know, we are in a time when oppressed and marginalized people are under assault in new ways. The empire is strong, and its servants are many.

This feast day of St. Kateri offers us a chance to pause and think about the perspective and experience of all those who are considered “other” in our midst and to align with them – IN REAL LIFE. It may require us to rethink what we have come to know and rethink taken-for-granted assumptions about our world or our faith. It may put us at odds with others as we reveal the “tensions” that live within our day-to-day experiences. It may require that we resist the demands of kings and empires (like Shiphrah and Puah did) through our civil disobedience. And it may even require our imprisonment and suffering.

While it is not an easy path, it is the path we are called to follow at this moment in history in the very circumstances in which we find ourselves. May we rise to the occasion.

Note: As I was writing this blog, my friend, Kit Miller, passed along this upcoming opportunity to become involved in a local, Indigenous struggle related to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. Modern data centers are posing a threat to local Indigenous lands, and you can learn more about this (and get involved) on July 24th at 6:30pm through a virtual screening of the short film “Unheard Voices: The Fight for the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s Way of Life” which will be followed by a virtual panel discussion. To sign up for the link to this event, please click here. And please stay tuned this fall for more events sponsored by or supported through our Indigenous Solidarity Group at Spiritus.