On this date in 1680, Kateri Tekakwitha breathed her last.  She was a captive orphan, a girl convert, a French Iroquois, and a Catholic saint.  Descriptions of her death are colored with racial overtones. 

A priest at her bedside observed, “This face, so marked and swarthy, suddenly changed about a quarter of an hour after her death, and became in a moment so beautiful and so white that I observed it immediately.”

Her gravestone reads:  “The fairest flower that ever bloomed among red men.”