Allan Greer is a 2011 Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada.

The daughter of a Algonquin mother and an Iroquois father, Catherine/Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) has become known over the centuries as a Catholic convert so holy that, almost immediately upon her death, she became the object of a cult. Today she is revered as a patron saint by Native Americans and the patroness of ecology and the environment by Catholics more generally, the first Native North American proposed for sainthood. Tekakwitha was born at a time of cataclysmic change, as Native Americans of the northeast experienced the effects of European contact and colonization. A convert to Catholicism in the 1670s, she embarked on a physically and mentally grueling program of self-denial, aiming to capture the spiritual power of the newcomers from across the sea. Her story intersects with that of Claude Chauchetière, a French Jesuit of mystical tendencies who came to America hoping to rescue savages from sin and paganism. But it was Claude himself who needed help to face down his own despair. He became convinced that Tekakwitha was a genuine saint and that conviction gave meaning to his life. Though she lived until just 24, Tekakwitha's severe penances and vivid visions were so pronounced that Chauchetière wrote an elegiac hagiography shortly after her death. With this richly crafted study, Allan Greer has written a dual biography of Tekakwitha and Chauchetière, unpacking their cultures in Native America and in France. He examines the missionary and conversion activities of the Jesuits in Canada, and explains the Indian religious practices that interweave with converts' Catholic practices. He also relates how Tekakwitha's legend spread through the hagiographies and to areas of the United States, Canada, Europe, and Mexico in the centuries since her death. The book also explores issues of body and soul, illness and healing, sexuality and celibacy, as revealed in the lives of a man and a woman, from profoundly different worlds, who met centuries ago in the remote Mohawk village of Kahnawake.

Allan Greer is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

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"Catherine Tekawitha and the legends she inspired are among the most fascinating of seventeenth-century North America. Allan Greer has given us a richly documented and beautifully written portrait of her world: of this Mohawk holy woman and the ascetic Christianity she and her sister converts fashioned for themselves, of the Jesuits who converted and wrote about her and even believed she was a saint. Mohawk Saint provides a new way to understand the wounds and transformations of the colonial encounter."--Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives

"By narrating the life of Catherine Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman who became a Catholic Saint, Allan Greer humanizes the great, transforming encounter of early modern Europeans with the natives of North America. Exploiting rare and rich documents with keen insight, Greer recovers a dangerous world roiled by supernatural struggle. Deftly written and humanely empathetic, Mohawk Saint illuminates the creative interplay of natives and colonists during the exploration of new lands and the discovery of strange spirits."-- Alan Taylor, University of California at Davis, and author of American Colonies

"In rescuing the "lily of the Mohawks" from her hagiograhers, Allan Greer has produced an utterly fascinating volume."--Michael Walsh

"This book is an excellent example of what an analysis of life on both sides of the ocean can reap.... I strongly recommend Mohawk Saint to the readers of the Atlantic history list. I also recommend it for anyone interested in colonial America, Native America, spiritual practices, or identity issues in Europe or America. Finally, it is deftly written and would make terrific reading for upper-level and graduate courses."--H-NET

"It's about time that a gifted historian wrenched Catherine Tekakwitha out of the hands of the hagiographers. Allan Greer makes the most of that opportunity, recasting the remarkable story of Catherine's life as a kind of case study in Native American and European cultural syncretism. A first-rate book on a fundamentally important theme."--John Demos, author of The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

"Being a Mohawk from Kahnawake, I'm very much aware how Tekakwitha has been appropriated for other purposes since her death in 1680, and how this affects our view of her today. Greer has restored her identity as an individual human being within a momentous historical and cross-cultural context, while giving us a close look at her contemporary Jesuit biographers. Enlightening."--A. Brian Deer, former director, Kahnawake Cultural Center

"Greer masterfully sheds light on everything he writes about..."--CHOICE

"Mohawk Saint is quite simply the best book I have read on the momentous and vexed encounter of Europeans and Native Americans in the Early Modern world. A must-read for anyone interested in New France or colonial Native Americans, it provides an intimate and imaginative portrait of both the Mohawk Catherine and the French missionaries with whom she interacted in the seventeenth-century Praying Iroquois community of Kahnawake."--H-NET