Life and Times of Kateri Tekakwitha, The Lily of the Mohawks

Her name meant "she who places her bets on the wrong thing" - a nickname given by her tribe to the Mohawk woman who abandoned her people's ways for the white man's God. Born in 1656 amid the forests of upstate New York, Kateri Tekakwitha survived a smallpox epidemic that killed her family and left her face marked, her vision impaired. Despite pressure, persecution, and a tyrannical uncle who opposed her conversion, she chose baptism at seventeen and dedicated herself to virginity. When her uncle threatened violence, she made the perilous winter escape through the woods to a mission in Canada, where she lived only six more years before dying at twenty-four. Walworth's biography draws on firsthand accounts from Jesuit missionaries and indigenous witnesses who knew her, bringing the world of the Mohawk and the turning point of New France vividly to life. This is both the story of one woman's extraordinary courage and a window into a pivotal moment when two worlds collided.