09/06/2026
Kateri Tekakwitha: International Day of the World’s Indigenous Women and Girls, Sep 5
Creator’s blessing rests on the pure of heart. They are the ones who will see the Great Spirit.
~ Creator Sets Free, Mt 5:8 FNV
Born in 1656, Kateri was the Daughter of a Mohawk chief (Kenneronkwa) and a Christian Algonquin mother (Kahenta). Smallpox took both her parents and baby brother when she was only four. At twenty, she became a disciple of Christ, while departing upstate New York for the St. Francis Xavier Mission, a Christian Native American community north of Lake Ontarí:io, where she lived for four years until tuberculosis took her life. Kateri was canonized in the Catholic Church in 2012.
I am not my own; I have given myself to Creator Sets Free* (Yeshua). He must be my only love.
~ Kateri Tekakwitha
Love is the answer, no matter what the question.
~ Lyla June Johnston, Cheyanne & Navajo
I think that, ultimately, forgiveness is going to be our greatest tool as Indigenous peoples. If we can let go of that anger, hatred, animosity, and bitterness, we’re going to feel better.
~ Lyla June Johnston
The thing to keep in mind is that laws are framed by those who happen to be in power and for the purpose of keeping them in power.
~ Mary Crow Dog, Lakota
Moral power is always more dangerous to an oppressor than political force.
~ Mary Crow Dog
The men who had brought us wh***ey and the smallpox had come with the cross in one hand and the gun in the other.
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota
True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others.
~ Joy Harjo, Creek
My heart and I lie small upon the earth like a grain of throbbing sand. With the strong, happy sense that both great and small are so surely enfolded in His magnitude... I am buoyant with good nature.
~ Zitkala-Ša, Dakota/Yepkennti
O Great Spirit
help me always
to speak the truth quietly,
to listen with an open mind
when others speak
and to remember the peace
that may be found in silence.
~ Cherokee Prayer
*Creator Sets Free is the translation the recent First Nations Version Bible uses for Jesus. (I’ve included it in the block print, although digitally. I’ll probably rework this). Tekakwitha would have most likely been familiar with the English translation Iusus or Jesus, which became a hard J in the seventeenth century, about the time that she lived. Previously, Iēsous (Greek) and Iesus (Latin and early English versions) were used.
