Colonized to Canonized

Kateri Tekakwitha

Recently I read an article in the Chronicle Herald, it was a front page article on Monday, October 22 2012 titled Lily of the Mohawks, and it was about how the Vatican had canonized its first Aboriginal saint named Kateri Tekakwitha, who was a young Aboriginal woman that was born in 1656. Other articles further expand on the new canonizations stating that seven new saints were canonized in, what the articles have said is, an effort to revive Christianity in places where is it lagging. Much celebration was had in Rome and throughout the world. Some things of note from the Chronicle Herald article are that her parents died of smallpox which did not exsist in the Americas and is something that can be linked to colonialism, and that the pope spoke in both French and English to honor her “Canadian-ness.” I want to talk about how religion, in this case Christianity, is used for the continued enforcement of imperial rule and colonial advancement. One of the first things new colonist brought to north America was religion, through religion the European colonist could “normalize” the native populations. Religion was used as a tool to attempt to bring the native population under the control
of an imperial force, either the church of England who’s head would have been the king, or the catholic church who’s head is the pope based in Rome, both European powers. The article was accompanied by a photo of a nun wearing a colourful headdress of dyed feathers. The appropriation of Aboriginal culture is not uncommon or is it new, we can see it in the characterization of

Aboriginals as “savages,” “primitives,” and “uncivilized” when used as mascots in most media, be it print, video or otherwise. In relation to the canonization of Kateri, she is revered for her ability to move past the “primitive” and embrace Catholicism in the face of exclusion from her “own people.” This move toward “normalization” is seen as a positive from conquering forces and can be linked to the Martha Steigman, Sherry Pictou movie, In the Same Boat, about how the department of fisheries and oceans in Canada (DFO) is attempting to control and normalize the Aboriginal fisheries  through the process of offering them money and resources to fish under the DFO rules after it had been asserted by the supreme court of Canada that Aboriginal fisheries could operate as per treaty agreements outlined in the Marshall decision. This link is like the church control and “normalization” of Aboriginal populations through the use of religion to change the way that Aboriginals see the world by replacing a traditional value system, be it how aboriginals self-manage natural resources, or what they hold as sacred, with a European value system.