The name Tekakwitha is a girl's name meaning "she who puts things in place; she who bumps into things".

Tekakwitha was a 17th-century Mohawk woman, who survived the smallpox epidemic that killed her family. She is known for rejecting pressures from those around her to give up her Catholic beliefs and to marry someone who they approved of instead. She later fled her village and converted to Catholicism. 
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Known as the first Native American Catholic saint, she was baptized as Catherine, or Kateri in Mohawk, but her given name was Tekakwitha, meaning "she who bumps into things", though it is sometimes interpreted as "she who puts things in place" too. 
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Sometimes called Lily of the Mohawks, Tekakwitha is the patron saint of ecology and environment. Her canonization in 2012 was met with mixed feelings by Native Americans, with several Mohawk scholars questioning if it was a way to pull people away from their ancestral Indigenous values and others celebrating it as an example of bridging cultures.


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