It has often been the lot of religious heroes to have their legacies poked, prodded and squeezed to fit the cultural, psychological and political agendas of more modern times. Catherine Tekakwitha, the unofficial saint of Kahnawake, has been positioned by American Catholics as an icon of nationalism, appropriated by environmentalists as a patroness of ecological values, drawn in storybooks to suit antiquated notions of little Indians frolicking in wooded glades, and even avoided by Canadian First Nations groups seeking to redress an oppressive history of Catholic assimilation. In Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits, Allan Greer cuts through these obscuring accretions to find the person behind the folklore, whose short life inspired the unexpected devotion of two French Jesuits and their unlikely quest to canonize her--a woman who, in her appearance, her language and her way of life, remained to the end a Mohawk.

Instead of chronicling the sweeping movements of empires, Greer embroiders an intricate microhistory from the strands of three lives coming from two different worlds, in order to "challenge prevailing views of Iroquois history, particularly on the subject of conversion to Christianity." He crafts a masterful story using a historiographical approach that combines intensive analysis of hagiographies about Catherine's life with a detailed examination of the influences, beliefs and motivations that shaped the inner worlds of his two Jesuits: Claude Chauchetière and Pierre Cholenec. Greer knits together archaeological and ethnographic evidence to reconstruct the hybrid cultural environment which distinguished the French-Iroquois contact zone after the peace of 1667, an area that fringed Lake Ontario and reached eastwards as far as Lake Champlain and Montreal.

Mainstream European accounts of missionary encounters have tended to treat North American Natives "primarily as the objects of apostolic attention," rather than as autonomous actors on their own spiritual journey to Christianity. Saint Francis Xavier's crusades among savages in the East Indies established this standard for French Jesuits like Claude Chauchetière, who studied the saint's letters while preparing for his own life of service. Greer's careful rendering debunks these myths and demonstrates that the old concept of conversion offers an insufficient framework for understanding the multifaceted aspects of what went on in Kahnawake. The Jesuits certainly did not "convert" Catherine: she learned Christianity mainly through contact with other Iroquois Christians and sought to circumvent the French priestly monopoly to gain more direct access to Christian mysteries. Neither could the actions of one young Iroquois woman alone "convert" Jesuits brought up within a male-dominated European society and hardened by years of religious training. The mental transformation that allowed them to see reflections of themselves in this Mohawk woman, this "other," came not merely from observing her, but from a predisposition as Jesuits to adapt to different cultures, from their literary battles with the imperatives of Catholic sacred biography, and from the unique cultural milieu in which their encounter took place.

Greer begins by dispelling any doubts that Catherine Tekakwitha was, in every conceivable way, a Mohawk. He describes her Algonquin mother's abduction into Mohawk society, Catherine's early life in Gandaouagué, her baptism by the resident Jesuit and the social and economic processes to which she was inseparably bound. Particularly revealing is Greer's long dissection of the crafts and other women's work that Catherine engaged in, although a diagram or two would have helped the reader visualize the objects he describes.

An essential aspect of Catherine's character came from the syncretic Iroquois culture. The Iroquois absorbed cultural elements of other peoples as part of living alliance relationships that went beyond simple peace treaties. It is within this context that the idea of Catherine's "conversion" breaks down. Adopting Catholicism from the French was very much an Iroquois thing to do, "in order to partake of what their allies presented as a central element of their identity." Furthermore, Catherine sought to bypass French priests in seeking deeper experiences of Christianity through asceticism, by severe penance and by creating her own Native convent in secret defiance of the patriarchal establishment. By infusing her new belief with the fruits of her Iroquois roots, Catherine went beyond a simple adherence to standard missionary fare to develop her own brand of do-it-yourself Christianity where she was ultimately in control.

Francis Xavier, with Portuguese power at his back, had been happy to force baptism on Natives and accept the smashing of idols in place of more meaningful expressions of faith. But as Greer writes elsewhere, other Jesuits in India and China found ways to "infiltrate" the civilizations they lived in, to adopt their languages and cultural attributes to be accepted more easily, and to adapt by compromising on certain points of doctrine and ritual. In New France--where the alliance basis of French-Iroquois relations prevented European cultural practices from dominating Indian ones--Chauchetière and Cholenec were able to recognize aspects of Iroquois culture in Catherine's fervent devotion that matched their mental patterns of what Christian saintliness meant.

Yet Chauchetière's and Cholenec's transformation did not result from merely observing Catherine Tekakwitha's life. Equally important were their literary crusades against the embedded cultural prejudices in Catholic thinking, which they faced in seeking sainthood for Catherine. "[A] saint was not really a saint," writes Greer, "without a vita sanctorum," a sacred biography, and both Chauchetière and Cholenec set out to provide one. Struggling to make Catherine conform to hagiographic stock plots forced the two Jesuits to wrestle with her example and to separate, in their own minds, European cultural norms from the heroism that was at the core of their faith. Chauchetière, the more creative, idealistic and unstable of the two, produced a broad portrait that covered the healing miracles attributed to Catherine, her austere way of life, her charity, industry and strength of character, as well as that "certain ineffable holy quality" he had seen in her and that he believed had cured his own tortured soul. Chauchetière, says Greer, struggles on almost every page of his biography "to overcome his own lingering sense that the terms 'holy' and 'Indian' belonged to separate, incommensurable universes." But Cholenec, whose seasoned mind was both more cautious than his younger colleague's and more sensitive to the attitudes of European Catholics, shaped his account of Catherine's saintly behaviour to fit the more conventional theme of celibacy--an aspect of Catherine's life that, if true, was idiosyncratic among Iroquois. Knowing that an Indian virgin was unlikely to be convincing to his audience, Cholenec attempted to fix the facts around the policy. He turned a probably non-existent vow of celibacy into a historical record and used a story of cannibalistic acts by one of Catherine's friends to separate Tekakwitha from the savagery associated with her people. Even though she was Mohawk on the outside, Cholenec was trying to say, she was really a saint.

If such a dramatic revolution in cultural understanding was going to happen anywhere, it was going to happen in Kahnawake. This Christian Iroquois settlement, situated on the south bank of the St. Lawrence just upriver from Montreal, was a hybrid town born out of the uncoordinated northward migration of Iroquois as they responded peacefully to the French colonization of Montreal. Even within the syncretic Iroquois culture, Kahnawake was an extreme example of "the Indians' Middle Ground." For Catherine and the Mohawks, Greer explains, they had to "find a way of adjusting to the expectations of the [French] ambient society without melting into it." For the Jesuits, this required heightened scrutiny of their new environment to determine "what came from God and what did not." At least as much as the Mohawks, the Jesuits were "making the best of situations they neither created nor fully understood."

The process of transformation, then, was too complex and multifaceted to be captured within traditional, one-way notions of conversion. Throughout Mohawk Saint, Allan Greer makes the compelling case that instead of a contest of cultures, "[t]he language of 'layering' and 'interpenetration' or...the 'braiding' of cultures, better serves us." He also shows that our modern Western mindset is as different from that of 17th century European Jesuits as it is from the Natives they wrote about.

Yet to undertake such a complex thing in 200 tightly written pages is not an easy task and, almost inevitably, Greer's treatise begins to fray toward the end. The Epilogue muddies the pristine portrait that he has so painstakingly embellished. It takes the form of a travelogue through the various societies and groups dedicated to Catherine across the western United States. But the purpose of Mohawk Saint is to free the reader from the divergent political and cultural agendas that have encrusted the story of Catherine. Why, then, does Greer only introduce them to us in detail just moments before he leaves us alone with our thoughts?

Allan Greer's skill in reconstructing Catherine Tekakwitha as a historical person from hagiographic raw material, and extricating her from the tangle of legend, is extraordinary. His achievement becomes even more astonishing when we realize that within this compelling portrait of a complex woman only four sentences of her actual words appear, and that even these deathbed platitudes were probably invented for hagiographic purposes. But this also underscores the unfortunate fact that even with all the details of Greer's carefully crafted microhistory, he can still only tell us very little about what his main character actually thought and felt about the things she saw, the people she met and the events she lived through. "These are questions," he writes with a trace of sadness, "that no historian can answer."