and allowed to build Saint Peter’s Mission, a small bark church. After Kateri again becomes ill, she encounters Father James de Lamberville, whom she identifies metaphorically with crows, which have power: “I remembered when the Jesuit entered the longhouse with his crow wings folded. His beak guideth me.” The priest talks to her of God, Christ, and the Holy Book from which he reads, quoting Ezekiel, his favorite. She tells him of her mother, who spoke to her of “a holy bath.” Kateri hopes to be baptized too. Even though her family tries to arrange a marriage for her, she wants to study with the priest: “How could I marry when I heard the prophets’ visions? How could I marry when I wanted the visions myself?”

Historically, the strongest tribal hostility toward the Jesuits and the French came from the Mohawks. Although Kateri’s uncle strongly opposes her wish, she receives instruction from Father de Lamberville, who, on Easter Sunday, 1676, gives her the baptismal name of Kateri (the Mohawk pronunciation), after Saint Catherine of Siena. Her remaining family is hostile to her conversion. Boys throw rocks at her; she is mocked, threatened, and seen as a traitor to the old ways. However, ongoing problems such as disease, whiskey, and tribal wars eventually cause many of the Mohawks to become indifferent to Christianity. Kateri’s friend Enit has already fled north to Saint Francis Xavier Mission in Canada, a Jesuit refuge for Native American converts, and Father de Lamberville realizes he must send Kateri away too for her own safety. Eventually, she leaves Saint Peter’s Mission at Caughnawaga, in what will become New York, for the northern settlement also named Caughnawaga, on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec.

Nearly blind, Kateri probes the world around her, trying to make sense of what she cannot see or comprehend. She is moving toward a strong religious faith, even though she understands it differently from the Europeans. She is committed to reaching the new mission. Even with her friends’ help, it takes her two months to get there. Once in Canada, Kateri offers herself to God as reparation for the sins of her people. Removing her beads and eel-skin ribbons, she does penance. She scourges herself, standing in the chill Saint Lawrence River up to her chest. She fasts, refuses blankets, and pierces herself with thorns. She burns herself in order to understand the torments of hell, so that she will better know how to pray; then, she believes, she will be able to teach others. Her friends beg her to stop.

Christmas Day, 1677, marks Kateri’s first communion at Saint Francis Xavier. She is enchanted when for an instant she can see clearly and recognizes that the moon is pockmarked. She notes surface irregularities in nature, especially on rocks. She believes that Christ has known smallpox too because he has holes in his hands and feet. These images comfort her.

The strict Father Claude Chauchetiere, who has endured a nightmarish sea journey from France, believes that the priests have brought God’s mercy to the mission and despairs that some of the Indians are turning away: “I came to help the Indians.I was prepared to be a Jesuit martyr.I was not prepared for indifference.” Alternately depressed and angry, he later is able to ask God for a gentler spirit. When he observes Kateri, he thinks he sees a light around her, and he notices that she continues to help others, even though she is often feverish and vomiting. He marvels at her suffering. She, in turn, is horrified by the cruelties that have been visited on the refugees who continue to arrive with flesh cut from their bodies or boiling water poured into their open wounds by other tribesor perhaps their own.

Another priest, gentle Father Pierre Cholenec, notes with shock how thin Kateri is becoming, although she continues to make Indian bread and participate in ceremonial planting. She still beads and dyes threads and porcupine quills, while she teaches these skills to the girls. Although she can be analytic and intuitive, at times her thoughts race and she seems almost irrational, but this incoherence may reveal her gradual transition to a more spiritual level.

Father Cholenec is present at Kateri’s deathbed on April 17, 1680, when she is twenty-four. In her biography, which he will later write, he will report that her last words were “Jesus, I love you” in Mohawk, and that shortly afterward, “We saw the scars on her face disappear. Her fingers uncurled. Her skin was smooth in death.” Father Chauchetiere, also present, notes that the Indians marvel at the change in her physical appearance. Awed by Kateri’s death, they do penance. Father Chauchetiere in turn waits for visions: “I was not disappointed. I saw her as I prayed at her grave. I saw her with the crucifix in her hand. I saw a church turned on its side.” He will paint an early portrait of Kateri.

The Reason for Crows is a short book but not easily read. Often, it seems more like a play, as alternating voices carry it along. Kateri’s natural world is different, and readers must adapt to it. Her world of faith is rife with biblical and native symbolism that may not be familiar. The whole book is filled with rambling fragmentsthoughts, dreams, images, and memoriesdominated by the recurring image of the crow, an ambiguous symbol of good and ill, of death and, finally, life. As Kateri, the nascent saint, says in a firm voice of faith, “The Lord will transform our life. We will not perish. We have everlasting life. It is the reason for crows.”