After Tekakwitha’s beatification in 1980, Paula E. Holmes, in the late 1990s, interviewed several elderly Native American women about their childhoods and hearing stories from their ancestors about Tekakwitha. One woman retold her time in a church where her grandmother told her that she prayed to Kateri for her. One semiretired nurse from New Mexico told Holmes about her aunt’s fondness of Kateri and how people would travel to New York to learn about her. The nurse’s cousin told Holmes how her mother kept pictures of Kateri wrapped in fur and gave her a Tekakwitha medal. Holmes then stated that Kateri is "as part of their Indian familiar and familial heritage."