Allan Greer fournit une étude fouillée et décapante sur Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. Il y reproduit les dessins de Chauchetière. Il utilise l'huile sur toile en couleur sur la page couverture, mais en version réductrice après avoir recadré l'image en éliminant l'arbre à gauche, le côté de l'église et les portions supérieures et inférieures qui débordent de la figure de Tekakwitha. La légende suivante se lit sous une reproduction noir et blanc.

« Claude Chauchetière, oil portrait of Catherine Tekakwitha. Chauchetière drew many portraits of Tekakwitha, but this is the only one that Survives. Her costume, combining European and Iroquois elements, corresponds to textual descriptions. The setting, however, bears no real resemblance to Kahnawake. Catherine seems to float over a pastoral landscape with a large church as its most prominent feature. Unlike the images that proliferated in later centuries, pictures which invariably place Tekakwitha in a woodland setting, Chauchetière presents his subject as a saint rather than a creature of nature. Photograph courtesy of Anne M. Sheuerman [Greer 2005, p. 20]. »

S'il est novateur au niveau de ses interprétations textuelles, Greer est à la remorque de l'historiographie en ce qui concerne cette huile sur toile car il ne remet pas en question, comme il le fait ailleurs, les interprétations qui courent depuis la fin du XIXe siècle. Nous agréons toutefois à son interprétation de l'ascétisme pratiqué par Tekakwitha.

« [...] it is quite reasonable to suppose that the ascetic women of Kahnawake were engaged in a hardening exercise designed both to enhance their physical courage and to help them achieve mystical ecstasy and spiritual power. Clearly, something more was going on at Kahnawake than "penance" in the sense of discharging the debts of sin and accumulating credit against a future term in purgatory. These women appear to have been in pursuit of direct and profound religious experience. [...] Catherine of Siena [...] and other mystic ascetics suffered self-inflicted torments that tested the limits of bodily endurance as they strove to break through the confines of mundane existence and partake of the divine. It can be difficult for modem people to come to terms with such behavior as anything but a symptom of psychological disorder. The glib post-Freudian response is to sexualize ascetic practice, to see it as an attempt literally to "beat down" sexual urges or, altematively, as an actual sexual performance in a bent masochistic form. Enough eroticism does indeed suffuse most versions of ascetic mysticism to give these unhistorical interpretations a degree of plausibility, but they remain reductionist and utterly inadequate to the task of understanding asceticism on its own terms [Greer 2005, p. 120]. »

Les intenses et extrêmes pratiques masochistes, abondamment documentées par l'écrit, ont été complètement oblitérées dans l'iconographie de plus en plus mielleuse consacrée à cette autochtone...

Couverture de la traduction française (Greer 2007) : « Mother Mary Nealis, Kateri Tekakwitha, RCSJ, 1927, Tekakwitha Conference National Center. »