Lace Making in Southern California

Lace Making in

Southern California

Episcopalians answered the call for justice on Indian Reservations across America by the end of the 19th century. One woman, Sybil Carter, took her responsibility to the Indian poor seriously, although she was vain enough to name her organization after herself. Evidently a wealthy woman, she formed the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association which served a number of Reservations among the Ojibwa and the Mohawk. The mission of the organization was two pronged. The first goal was to provide Indian women with materials and instruction in lace making. At that time lace was all made by hand-twisting threads of linen in decorative patterns; it had not been mechanized as yet. The second goal was to serve as agents in the sale of the work to the garment industry of New York City. The Association would buy the lace from the workers and then resell it. Any profit was pumped back into the program by hiring new teachers and providing an uninterrupted supply of materials.

In an attempt to bring more money to the Reservations of Southern California, the lace-making program was started at the beginning of May 1904 at three Reservations, La Jolla, Mesa Grande, and Santa Ysabel. Eventually the Mission Indian Agency would employ a government lace teacher who taught at Pala and Malki. Drawn work, a kind of handwork in which the threads of a fabric are removed so that the vacant spaces create a decorative pattern, was taught to the Indian women by the Spanish more than 100 years before. DuBois lamented, in 1906, the problems of the hand workers thus, “...they are too poor to purchase the necessary linen and they require intelligent supervision to enable them to place their products on the market.” Intelligent supervision was evidently DuBois’ term for an agent or distributor. Already trained in Western style handwork generations earlier, the women learned lace making instantly. In two short weeks, by the 17th of May, $25.50 was generated by lace making according to the papers of Constance Goddard DuBois. Mrs. Grace Lachusa of Mesa Grande was explicit about the value of lace making for her family

Who could be more interested in this work than me for I know what good it has done. In fact my parents couldn’t of never kept us seven children together if it hadn’t been for the lace work. There wasn’t much work here then for my father and my mother was sick. He tried to wrestle a living out of farming these dry hills as he couldn’t go away for work and leave us all alone, so we made the living for many months with our lace work.

The practical side of what the work is today is found in improved homes, additions to houses, the purchase of farm implements and animals, and the many comforts which never could have been enjoyed on the slender incomes from the land alone. A store-keeper once remarked that he would have to go out of business if the women didi not have their lace money, and not long ago several of the workers, with a good deal of pride, pointed to “lace pigs,” “Lace cows,” “ lace houses,” etc.

Lace making was so profitable it came to replace basket making for a few years, at least in Mesa Grande. The end of the “basket craze” among collectors and institutions meant falling basket prices which made making lace more profitable. Every basket has a huge amount of labor hidden within. For every hour spent in stitching a coiled basket, another hour has been spent securing and preparing the materials, getting ready to stitch. Since the Belgian linen thread used in lace making needed no preparation, income could be produced fifty-percent faster. Lace making supplanted basket making after the end of the “craze.” Mesa Grande reservation women under the direction of the Sybil Carter lace teacher, Grace Dycke, sent $1,484.85 worth of lace to New York between October 1917 and April 1918, according to the records of the Mission Indian Agency housed in the National Archives in Laguna Niguel California.

According to those same records, Mrs. Lachusa, was an outstanding lace maker. She learned to make lace at the age of eight and by age twelve she was assisting the teacher. Within a year she went to New York to work as a lace making teacher; there she stayed for fourteen years. In 1922 she returned to Mesa Grande. At the height of the depression she worked with Superintendent John W. Dady of the Mission Indian Agency to revive lace making. In a letter to him she recalled her own experience as a lace-making teacher

Fewer girls wanted to learn basket making, but many wanted to learn lace making. Lace was stylish and didn’t require the long trips to gather materials that basket making did. The problem of a ready local market had been solved with the growth of Los Angeles. Lace making became so profitable that the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association officially withdrew its support because Indian women found a direct market for their work as California filled with white people. Events half a world away were to bring lace making in Southern California to a standstill.

Basket making was an ideal industry for families denied normal access to the economic system because the process did not require the outlay of any cash. All of the tools and materials had been developed before the introduction of a capitalist economy and therefore were not dependent upon such a system. Drawn work and lace making were different. Drawn work depended upon the acquisition of linen yardage. Lace making depended upon the import of rust-proof steel pins and Belgian linen thread, a completely uniform, small-diameter thread. There were no local substitutes for these materials and cash was required to buy the imports. The only “fabrics” used in Southern California were cloaks made of strips of rabbit skin interwoven with milkweed or hemp cordage, skirts of shredded bast fibers, and mats made of pierced reeds threaded together on four or five rows of cordage. Despite the fact that the knotting of thread in making lace was very similar to the twisting of cordage in making nets, lace requires the strength of steel pins holding it under tension as it is twisted; nets did not require this. Indian hemp and milkweed were unavailable in sufficient amounts for lace making, because of their relative scarcity caused by overgrazing and drought not because the women couldn’t make very fine cordage. Mrs. Lachusa recalled in September 1933

This dependence on outside supply had doomed the lace-making industry by 1918 when commercial cargo ships ceased to cross the Atlantic Ocean due to World War I. A letter dated June 17, 1918 from Olivia M. Cutting, President of the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association, to Cato Sells, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington DC, predicts the failure of the Association, “With regard to the thread situation, I may say that it is serious if not critical. It is practically impossible to enlarge our present supply to any appreciable extent and what we have is far from desirable.” Superintendent of Soboba School, Harry E. Wadsworth received a letter from Ellen Lawrence, the government lace teacher at Pala and Malki regarding the status of the lace-making funds. She wrote that from July 1, 1917 until June 24, 1918 she had paid out only $79.92 to women for lace. She noted that some women were selling their laces at fairs and elsewhere and were giving her no account of how much revenue had been received from lace making. The school girls, she said, were making lace and keeping it.

As the supply of linen and pins dwindled, some lace making-programs were slated for closure. Because of the small dollar amount of lace being passed through her hands Sells ordered the position of government lace teacher abolished, saying he hoped the women would continue lace making on their own.

Lace making was forgotten in the absence of materials for nearly ten years. Then an attempt was made to revive lace making on the Reservations in 1930 by order of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Records show that J. W. Dady pursued the issue infrequently for nearly five years. He wrote to Bullock’s Department Store in 1931 to see if they were interested in supplying thread and buying lace. Nothing came of the inquiry and Dady, stymied by a lack of suitable materials, lost all enthusiasm for the project in 1935. He shifted his focus to securing funds to hire a basket-making teacher, however and lace making was nearly forgotten as basket making resurged again after the hiatus of the 1920s. Today, no one makes lace, but some of the elders remember seeing lace around the house and even fewer remember anyone twisting threads into lace.