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October 11, 2025By Bill Doyle | CFP Correspondent
WORCESTER – Choosing a confirmation name was easy for Dana Howling Wolf Keller.
Dana, a 16-year-old Notre Dame Academy junior, is a Native American and she looks up to St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American to be canonized. Dana will make her confirmation on Nov. 1 at St. Mary Parish in her hometown of Shrewsbury, but she decided to take the name of Kateri two years ago.
Dana’s birthday is July 14, which happens to be the date that St. Kateri’s feast day is celebrated in the U.S.
Dana now has an even more important connection to St. Kateri. She posed for a painting of St. Kateri for one of four 25-foot-high murals that were unveiled last month in the foyer of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.
“It meant so much to me on a deeper level because of how much I’ve connected to her,” Dana said. “So being able to portray someone I connect with and resemble and see myself through was so special to me.”
Artist Adam Cvijanovic took two years to paint 75 people on the four murals. Dana’s mother, Patty Keller, noticed an online posting for posing for the mural and Dana became one of several models who portrayed prominent figures from New York. St. Kateri is depicted in a mural with Archbishop John Hughes, first Archbishop of New York and builder of St. Patrick’s Cathedral; former Governor Al Smith, the first Catholic nominee for U.S. President from a major party; social activist Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement; and philanthropist Pierre Toussaint, founder of Catholic Charities of New York.
“It’s kind of shocking and surprising to me because I didn’t ever think this could happen,” Dana said.
St. Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–1680), known as the “Lily of the Mohawks,” was born in present-day upstate New York. Smallpox claimed the lives of her Mohawk father, her Christian Algonquin mother and her brother, and left Kateri visually impaired and with severe facial scars that she covered with a veil. Refusing marriage, she chose instead to dedicate her life to God and lived a life of deep faith and caring for the sick until her death at age 24. Upon her death, her facial scars vanished.
St. Kateri was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, and she is recognized as the patroness of orphans, Native Americans and the environment.
The 2,400-seat St. Patrick’s Cathedral is nicknamed “America’s Cathedral” because it’s the largest Gothic Revival Catholic cathedral in North America. More than 5.5 million people visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral each year and when they view the mural of St. Kateri, they’ll see Dana standing in her place.
“Thinking that a ton of people are going to see me hasn’t really hit me yet,” Dana said. “I think of it in the way that they’re going to see her more than see me because it’s about her.”
Dana, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation of North Dakota, overcame a difficult upbringing of her own to become the face of a Native American saint.
Patty and John Keller became Dana’s fifth foster parents when she was four and after years of trying they adopted her when she was eight and a half. She is their only child.
Her tribe tried to take her back a couple of times and Mrs. Keller said one of the reasons they left their home in North Dakota was they feared the tribe would continue to try to do so.
“When we got her, she didn’t talk, she wasn’t potty trained and her teeth were rotten from neglect,” Mrs. Keller said.
Dana was diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder, a result of neglect or abuse and characterized by the inability to form emotional attachments with caregivers, difficulties with social interactions and a lack of trust.
“When I was in foster care I was always afraid that people were going to leave me all the time,” she said. “That’s when I started being a little distant ...”
Dana credits her adopted parents with teaching her to trust people and realizing she won’t be abandoned.
“Being there for me and being able to take me in when they didn’t know who I was and I didn’t know who they were,” she said. “Overcoming the challenges of seeing me as a 4-year-old with really nothing in me. I didn’t really seem like a child, I was just like a body ... not really with a personality or anything.”
She said her parents helped her grow as a person and made her feel welcomed and loved. Her faith also played a key role in her development.
“I wouldn’t say it’s luck that I’ve had,” she said. “I think it’s my faith that I’ve had in God and being able to pray to him and look for him and try to connect to him and him helping me along the way.”
Dana was born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and was later diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Nevertheless, Dana carries a 3.8 grade point average at Notre Dame Academy and is the star of the school’s highly ranked volleyball team. She also plays basketball and volunteers for the Special Olympics and at the library.
“I think I’ve kind of pushed away from disorders and syndromes that I’ve been diagnosed with,” Dana said. “I try to not think too much about them. I try to push them out of my mind and keep going forward because they don’t really define me. I say that overcoming all the disorders defines me as a person.”
Dana was Miss Pre-Teen Shrewsbury when she was in the seventh grade, Miss Teen Shrewsbury when she was a freshman and runner-up Miss Shrewsbury when she was a sophomore. She was interested in getting involved in acting and modeling and her mother noticed a posting about someone looking for a Native American model about Dana’s age who lived on the East Coast. So she sent along Dana’s photo and portfolio.
Dana was interviewed via Zoom and in June of 2024 she and her parents traveled to New York City where Dana posed for photos and Mr. Cvijanovic made sketches. He painted the mural later.
The Kellers thought Dana had posed for an art exhibit that would be temporarily displayed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They found out otherwise when they viewed the mural for the first time on Friday, Sept. 19, during a reception in the basement of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Nearly 20 family members and friends attended.
During the reception Mr. Cvijanovic informed Dana that the mural would be on permanent display so that she and the other portrayers would be “immortal.”
“Just to think that I’m going to be ‘immortal,’ I looked up at my dad and I was in shock,” Dana said.
“I cried,” Mrs. Keller said. “To see your child who is a miracle to me, to see her at St. Patrick’s. I’m from New Jersey. So, St. Patrick’s Cathedral is important to me.”
“To see where I was at a young age and to see where I am now,” Dana said, “is crazy to me.”
Mr. Cvijanovic told Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who commissioned the mural, that Dana was a Native American who lived in five foster homes and who had chosen St. Kateri to be her confirmation name. So Dana was asked to bring the gifts to the altar during Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the Sunday after the reception and her parents joined her.
Dana said presenting the gifts in front of a packed St. Patrick’s Cathedral made her shake with nerves, but her anxiety vanished when Cardinal Dolan told her he was glad to see her.
“I was like, ‘Wow, he’s speaking to me and he knows who I am,’” Dana said. “He’s thanking me for being here with them. It meant so much to me to hear that from him.”
The gift shop at St. Patrick’s Cathedral sells boxes of six cards about the mural and Dana is pictured on one of the cards.
St. Kateri, who lived her final five years with Jesuits in Canada, and Dana, both left their tribes and became Catholics.
“I could just see myself within her of being not with her first family but being able to be loved by a second family,” Dana said.