Meaning and history
Kateri is a Mohawk form of Catherine, best known through Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Mohawk and Algonquin woman who converted to Catholicism and became the first Native American canonized by the Catholic Church. Catherine derives from Greek Aikaterine, whose original meaning is uncertain despite its later association with katharos, “pure.” Kateri therefore joins European Christian name history with a specifically Mohawk linguistic and cultural form that should not be reduced to a generic variant.
20062006: 37 births, rank #3,992
2007: 49 births, rank #3,376
2008: 35 births, rank #4,360
2009: 29 births, rank #4,931
2010: 29 births, rank #4,860
20112011: 43 births, rank #3,603
2012: 60 births, rank #2,866
2013: 62 births, rank #2,769
2014: 61 births, rank #2,809
2015: 47 births, rank #3,389
20162016: 52 births, rank #3,139
2017: 48 births, rank #3,305
2018: 55 births, rank #2,962
2019: 37 births, rank #3,923
2020: 31 births, rank #4,358
20212021: 43 births, rank #3,553
2022: 42 births, rank #3,653
2023: 41 births, rank #3,709
2024: 39 births, rank #3,822
20252025: 32 births, rank #4,352
In 2025, 32 babies were recorded with the name Kateri, ranking #4,352 among girls.