There’s a new face keeping watch over St. James Cathedral in Seattle — at least when she’s resting from her busy road schedule.
An icon of St. Kateri Tekakwitha now hangs in the Cathedral, the product of decades of prayer — completed 20 years after she was credited with healing a Washington boy from a terminal illness and 16 years after canonization as the first Native American saint.
The miracle at Seattle Children's Hospital
Born in 1656 in a Mohawk village, Tekakwitha lost her parents and was permanently scarred from smallpox at 4 years old. She took the name Kateri — the Mohawk form of Catherine — after she converted to Catholicism at 19 years old. Her conversion was not welcomed, as she forfeited marriage and traditional work for religious study and practice.
She was subsequently mistreated by her uncle, a Native chief, and walked 200 miles to an Indigenous Christian community near present-day Montreal. There, she devoted herself to fasting, prayer and service until her death at age 24.
Scars on her face were reportedly healed after her death and pilgrims would visit Kateri’s grave to pray to her for healing. One of the greatest miracles over the last three centuries attributed to St. Kateri — the one that sealed her sainthood — took place at Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2006.
At the age of 5, Jake Finkbonner of Ferndale, Washington, and descendant of the Lummi Nation, contracted a flesh-eating bacteria. After weeks spent in a coma, his parents turned to their priest to prepare last rites while they prayed to St. Kateri. Finkbonner’s great-aunt paid a visit with a friend: Sister Kateri Mitchell, a vowed religious sister and member of the Mohawk nation in New York.
Mitchell brought a relic, a part of St. Kateri’s wrist bone, and prayed over Finkbonner. The next day, his doctors told his family the infection was receding. He returned home from the hospital a few weeks later. Mitchell was asked to share about the experience with the Vatican and, in 2012, Kateri Tekakwitha was recognized as a saint.
Bringing the icon to life
The idea of the icon was first discussed soon after St. Kateri reached sainthood. It resurfaced around 2021 amid investigations into defunct boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada, including 17 in Washington, with histories of abusing Indigenous students.
Members of the Cathedral’s racial solidarity team and the Archdiocesan Native American Advisory Circle came together to identify ways they could help foster opportunities for reconciliation. Honoring St. Kateri was named. This time there was a firm sense of direction. Corinna Laughlin, a pastoral assistant at St. James, had seen a painting of St. Kateri in a New York City church, and reached out to that artist.
Patricia Brintle, a Haitian-American Catholic artist based in Queens, New York, accepted the call and began meeting with a team from across Washington. The artistic process was unique from any other piece the cathedral had previously commissioned.
“[The artist] really listened to the group and was open to letting them shape the image,” Laughlin said. “It was exciting to be part of it and to see how the process itself could strengthen relationships and help people feel really connected to the Cathedral — the mother church for everyone in the archdiocese of Seattle.”
Working as a group of 12 to shape a piece of art could have yielded varied results. Kiara Raven, an Ojibwe descendant, was an early member of the team to fulfill a promise made to a late elder on the Swinomish reservation to bring the icon to life.
Blessings in the details
She found the work to be unifying and harmonious as they built relationships with each other. The Native members invited the group and Brintle to a number of reservations in Washington for traditional ceremonies and masses. Elders on the Swinomish reservation blessed the artist’s hands as she began her painting.
“Everyone on the committee we consider relatives. They understand who we are not just as Natives, but as Native Catholics. We were of one heart and one mind. We trusted that each person was praying for St. Kateri to guide us — that we could each be her messenger,” Raven said.
There’s intentionality behind every piece of the icon. An initial draft, one of eight, depicted St. Kateri in a posture of prayer with folded hands. Brintle incorporated feedback from the group to instead show her hands open and lifted — a gesture of honor in the Coast Salish tradition.
St. Kateri wears a traditional Salish cedar bark hat that Northwest Natives would gift to her while her dress, skirt, leggings, moccasins and flowing hair resemble Mohawk regalia. Her necklace depicts wooden crosses she tied to tree branches as she walked and prayed in the forest. The color of the blue blanket wrapped around her was recommended by Sister Kateri Mitchell to mirror what the tribe would have likely received from European fur traders in her time.
A garden of lilies at her feet represents her purity. The turtle is for her presence in the turtle clan of Mohawks. She’s surrounded by native Pacific Northwest creatures as the patron saint of ecology: pine trees, mountains, salmon and Salish-style eagle imagery — their feathers carrying prayers to God. A river with a canoe behind her represents baptism, the St. Lawrence River that St. Kateri crossed to Canada and the sanctity of water to the Coast Salish people.
After giving feedback on a few drafts — the group left it up to the artist to finish the design. They saw the finished product for the first time with hundreds of others during a blessing at St. James Cathedral last October.
“It was magical. We all started crying. She was exactly the way she was meant to be,” Raven said. “Seeing ourselves in her amongst all the saints in the Cathedral is overwhelming. That representation, that visibility, is a major part of healing. She shows us we can be fully Native and fully Catholic. We don’t have to give up anything to be both.”
Visiting the faithful throughout Washington
Once the icon was finished, the group began to think through how to connect St. Kateri with as many people as possible. The archdiocese is invited to the annual St. Kateri Feast Day Mass at St. Joachim Church, by the Lummi people, each July near Bellingham.
So the committee decided the icon could also hit the road to visit Native communities across the state.
“Our women have always travelled to other villages as matchmakers and to build relationships,” Raven said. “I felt my heart saying she should go on a pilgrimage to see our elders and our children who may never be able to come to the Cathedral, so that they may still have a special personal relationship with her.”
Since the beginning of the year, St. Kateri and the same relic that healed the boy in Seattle Children’s Hospital have travelled to four parishes on Lummi, Puyallup, Swinomish and Tulalip lands. At each stop, many Natives and non-natives have come to pay respects.
Raven has sat for hours in the Cathedral watching as a wide range of visitors have come to pray with St. Kateri. As the patron saint of Native Americans, the environment and people in exile, the leaders hope that everyone can feel a connection to her.
“She has gathered the whole community. St. Kateri is a saint for everyone. She’s a reminder of the gifts and presence of Natives in our midst, and I hope a shrine to pray for a greater reverence for creation at a time where we need to be more mindful of how we treat the Earth and each other,” Laughlin said.
St. Kateri is back on the Cathedral wall now long-term to greet pilgrims — that is, until she’s called to perform her next miracle.
This story comes to you from FāVS News, a nonprofit newsroom covering faith and values in the Inland Northwest.