Claude Chauchetière, S.J. "The Life of the Good Catherine Tekakwitha, said now Saint Catherine Tekakwitha" (1695)

Chapter 4

Tekakwitha had a natural aversion to the pleasures and no thought of marriage, and as the smallpox had scarred her face that the young people did not think of her. Her relatives had wanted to see her established and pressed her to marry, but she did not want. Then she was looked upon as an unpleasant slave, who they thought she would become a burden on the longhouse. They had for a time sent her from longhouse to longhouse. This caused some of the Natives to say after the death of this saintly girl that God had taken her, because men did not want her.

The people, who they knew her as a small child said that she had spirit and was skilful, and especially with her fingers in making such objects as the other Natives do. If I would judge from the objects that I saw her make, I say with ease that she had worked skilfully in porcupine and moose skin. She had made belts that the Native women carry wood and wampum belts made of shell beads, which the ancients served in negotiating the affairs of the nation. Another occupation of the Native women is sewing that they had learned from the slaves, who were with them or the women from Europe. She was skilful in making ribbons, which the Natives do from eel skins or thick tree bark. These she had coloured red with the glue from sturgeons and are often employed among the Iroquois. She had known more than the Iroquois girls, because she made baskets and the buckets that served to take water. In this manner, her skills had kept her always with something to be occupied. She had sometimes made a hollow tree trunk for grinding corn, mats from tree bark and poles to stack the corn. Her everyday occupations to make the others live were to peel the corn, to make the sagamite and the Native bread, go in search of water, carry wood and she would also fill the plates with food and serve them.

Tekakwitha was infirm, but she was always the first to be at work. She would pass some years doing these everyday occupations of the Native life and before she was baptized. She had remained at her longhouse without visiting others and she was not of malicious talk of others. She was not indolent and would not be proud, which were vices common to the other girls and she was not attached to her dreams. It was said from her innocent childhood, she did not want to assist at the dances nor the games and on several occasions that she had shown prudence. She was timid from nature and appearing only when it was necessary. She had never showed any cruel spirit and would not endure to see anyone nor a slave being harmed, because she thought it as a sin to see a man tortured.