Lace Making in
Southern California
By the end of the 19th century Episcopalians were answering the call for justice on Indian Reservations across America. One Episcopal 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 Ojibwa and Mohawk reservations. 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 manufacturing had not yet been mechanized - all lace was made by hand-twisting threads of linen into decorative patterns, following a blueprint. The second role was to serve as agents in the sale of the lace to the garment industry of New York City. The Association bought the lace from the workers and then resold it. Any profit was pumped back into the program by hiring new teachers and by providing an uninterrupted supply of materials.
In an attempt to bring more money to the starving, reservation-imprisoned Native peoples 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 federal 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. Constance Goddard 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. By the 17th of May - two weeks after beginning the program - $25.50 was generated by lace making according to the papers of 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.
A brochure from the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association sums the economic impact up this way:
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 did 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 at 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
I did all my own blueprinting and making of the patterns and the Co. furnished all the material and I measured the lace and
paid the women here soon as they finished it. Mostly yard lace was made a few tried the small doilies. The yard lace was all the way from 10 ¢ a yard to $10.00 a yard. The main thing is to find a ready sale for the lace, so after they finish some they can get some cash.
Impressed by the cash paid for lace 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. Much less messy than basket making, which results in piles of trimmings, lace making could be easily accommodated in the home. The problem of a ready local market had been solved with the growth of Los Angeles. California filled with immigrants and when Indian women found a direct market for their work in the new immigrants, lace makers became successful business women in their own right. The women became so successful that the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association officially withdrew its support to move to areas where their help was needed more. The future looked rosy, with many Indian families rising out of poverty for the first time since the arrival of Europhones. Unfortunately, events half a world away were about to bring lace making in Southern California to a standstill.
Basket making was an ideal industry for families denied normal access to the American 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 fabric and 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.
There were several “fabrics” used in Southern California before the arrival of outsiders. Cloaks and blankets were made of soft ropes of twisted strips of rabbit skin with the fur left on woven together with soft milkweed or hemp cordage. Women wore skirts and aprons made of the shredded inner-bark or bast fibers of the willow and of agave fibers. People sat upon mats made of lengths of reeds, laid side by side and pierced with a threaded needle and strung together on four or five rows of cordage to produce a clean, smooth, insulated sitting surface. All of these things were produced without the need of any imported goods.
Fine cordage had been made in Southern California for eons, but by 1900 the plants used to make the finest of cordage, Indian hemp and milkweed, were unavailable in sufficient amounts for lace making. Once plentiful on the landscape, these plants had become relatively scarce due to overgrazing and drought. Although women could have substituted milkweed or hemp, there was not enough to fill the need - even if they had gone back to long gathering trips and hours of materials preparation.
Lace making was different - its success relied on imported goods. Despite the fact that the process of knotting threads in making lace is very similar to the twisting of cordage in making nets, lace making requires the strength of steel pins holding the web precisely in position and under even tension as it is created; nets did not require this. Mrs. Lachusa recalled in September 1933,
All the thread was imported thread mostly from Belgium and France and the B. B. pins from England...so we tried some
American thread the Barbours F. D. A. thread; which I think can be gotten in Los Angeles, but can’t say where. May be it
could be found from some of these traveling sales men.
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 and even fewer remember seeing anyone twisting threads into lace, but some of the elders remember seeing lace around the house and worn proudly by the children.
While huge economic benefit was gained by Southern California Indian families because of lace making, there were also some negative effects. The most critical negative effect of lace making was that while women were consumed with making money by making lace, they forgot the traditional textile working techniques that had sustained their people for thousands of years. By the time the lace making craze was through and J. W. Dady hoped to revive traditional crafts like basketmaking, he found that the average age of the remaining basket makers was a sobering 65 years. This meant that at least one and in most cases, two generations had skipped learning how to make baskets. This pushed basket making perilously close to the brink of extinction, because the knowledge needed to produce a fine basket goes so deep. For example, if the reeds used for the basket are harvested when the moon is not full, the reeds will twist as they dry making it difficult to split and sew with them. Reeds harvested under the full moon dry as straight as arrows. It only takes a generation or two for this kind of fine-grained detail to disappear from the knowledge base.
Still, Southern California women have kept basket making alive, if not thriving. Groups still gather regularly to share stories, techniques, materials, and to honor an art that has been practiced by every generation for at least 10,000 years, if we can believe the dates attributed to baskets found in dry caves throughout the West. For more information conduct an internet search on the term "California Indian Basketmaker's Association."
© Deborah Dozier
Note: The above article was extracted from the details found in the files of the Mission Indian Agency housed in the National Archives in Laguna Niguel, California.