| Diocesan News

“One of the harder things to do is just getting started,” he said.

That was a year ago.

Today, the nearly finished 44-by-90-inch pastel chalk drawing of the blessed American Indian woman stands alive with color in Zarembinski’s Lino Lakes studio, which is a converted chicken coop.

Kateri stands holding a birch cross to her heart and extending the rosary. A Jesuit priest stands near elevating the Eucharist, and two Mohawk children are at her feet. Behind her, American Indian men paddle the canoe that aided her escape to the Christian mission.

The finished panel will be going on its own journey for the June 30 dedication of the newly built earth-lodge-styled St. Anthony Church on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation near Mandaree, N.D. It will later be installed in the parish’s welcoming space.

A parishioner at St. Pius X Church in White Bear Lake, Minn., Zarembinski first visited the reservation eight years ago when he was asked to drive youth and adult volunteers to the annual Christian Life Camp. He’s been back nearly every year since.

As an artist, he spent his time there capturing images on paper. Last year, he noticed a statue of a young American Indian woman near the mission church’s altar. He sketched her, promising to send the American Indian children finished copies.

When Father Steve Kranz, the mission’s Benedictine pastor, saw the picture of Blessed Kateri, he asked for one for the parish – something much bigger than the 11-by-15-inch originals.

“It will be positioned very prominently as you come through the door,” Father Kranz said. “She’s the only [American] Indian person that’s on the way to canonization.... She speaks to the Indian in a beautiful way.”

Zarembinski, who received his art education at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, researched the life of Kateri, who lived from 1656 to 1680 in present-day New York and Canada.

Kateri’s Algonquin mother, Mohawk father and brother were killed by a smallpox epidemic that left her with scarring and impaired eyesight. Her mother was a Christian, and through Jesuit missionaries, Kateri converted to Christianity at age 20.

She subsequently was ostracized by her village, and she escaped to a Christian Indian village, where she was known for profound holiness.

“Kateri’s life centered around her love for Jesus,” said Zarembinski, who read books, examined tribe-specific beadwork and collected artwork copies of Kateri. He said he thought it was important to convey a biographically accurate depiction of Kateri – down to her age-progressed scarred hands and face.

Some accounts of Kateri’s life say the isolation she may have experienced due to her mottled skin was formative for her deep, interior prayer life. She was known to be so holy that people would gather around her after she received the Eucharist to bask in the grace that seemingly emanated from her.

It was fitting, then, that Zarembinski found the real-life model for his Kateri drawing while attending daily Mass at Assumption in St. Paul. On a cold morning a few days before Christmas, Becky Spotted Horse, 22, wandered into the church to warm her leg, which had been recently injured in a car accident.

Without her possessions or a home, Spotted Horse and her male companion accepted Zarembinski’s help in finding a place to stay. A week later, she called him to thank him and offer to be Kateri’s model.

The painting’s symbolism runs deep. The boy’s turtle with its shell divided into 13 panels represents the 13 groups within the American Indian Tortoise clan of the Mohawk – Kateri’s tribe.

The girl offers water lilies to Kateri, who is known as the “Lily of the Mohawks.” Lilies of the valley and other flora weave throughout the drawing, signifying Kateri as a patroness of ecology and the environment if she is made a saint.

She may also be the patroness of those in exile, those who have suffered the loss of parents, and those ridiculed, Zarembinski said.

“This is condensing her life and the church’s view of her into one, on a 4-by-8-[foot] panel,” he said.

Zarembinski’s pastel chalk medium is reminiscent of American Indian sand paintings, he said.

“You look at [the drawing] and say, ‘Wow, there’s so much in there,’” said Laura Fenzl, St. Pius X youth and young adult minister. “It’s not an Indian thing; it’s not a white thing; it’s a God thing.”

Fenzl, 44, has had a relationship with the St. Anthony mission church for 14 years, and organizes volunteers to be counselors at Christian Life Camp, a summer catechetical program for children on and near the reservation.

As saints serve as a connection between heaven and earth, so does Blessed Kateri serves as a connector between American Indian and non-Indian, Fenzl said.

“It’s like a stained glass window, and it teaches,” she said. “[The American Indians] know the story. It’s going to teach the white people.”

Father Kranz, 80, marvels at the drawing that will soon be in his church. “You see pictures of [Kateri], and this has character to it like none other I’ve ever seen before,” he said.