Lacemaking at Birch Coulee, 1893–1926

The lace-making school that operated at Birch Coulee at the turn of the twentieth century is an important part of the history of the Lower Sioux Indian Community. Although the school was an extension of the assimilation efforts directed towards Dakota people in the late 1800s, the Birch Coulee lace makers used the project to support their community, and to continue a long tradition of communal artmaking among Dakota women.

Before the US government named and recognized the Lower Sioux Indian Community in 1938, the same area was known as Birch Coulee. Its Dakota name was, and is, Caŋṡayapi (Where They Paint the Trees Red). In the early 1890s, Dakota women living there learned that their Ojibwe neighbors across Minnesota—at White Earth, Red Lake, and Leech Lake—were earning money by making lace as part of the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association. Eager to bring the same financial support to Birch Coulee, the women contacted Carter and asked her to organize a similar operation for them. Carter agreed. With the help of Bishop Henry Whipple, they organized a lace-making school at Birch Coulee in 1893 and opened it inside the local mission. It was the only such school in Minnesota with Dakota students.

Carter and other teachers introduced Birch Coulee students to the process of making lace, gave them supplies to begin working, and paid them by the piece. They mailed the finished lacework items to colleagues in New York, who then sold them in a shop on Fourth Avenue. In its first year of operation alone, the shop sold the lace to some of the most socially prominent women in the city, including Anne Morgan, Edith Stuyvesant Vanderbilt, and Olivia Mayard Cutting.

In October of 1895, only two years after the school opened, Birch Coulee students traveled by train to Fort Snelling to exhibit their lace at the Women’s Auxiliary Missionary Society in Minneapolis. Almeda (Amelia) St. Clair led the group, accompanied by elders and young women. In a dispatch filed after the event, the St. Paul Daily Globe praised “the dexterous manner in which they ply their trade.”

Almeda St. Clair, Julia Lawrence, Amelia Salisbury, and other women from Birch Coulee exhibited their artistry at the Paris Exposition (1900), the Pan-American Exposition (1901), and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904). After the Paris Exposition of 1900, the Indianapolis Sunday Journal noted that “The most elaborate lace and the most intricate patterns are made at Birch Coulie [sic], and the work shown at the Paris exposition was principally from this mission.” Jeanette Brooks Campbell, Maggie Whipple, Mary Wabasha, Lucy Thomas, Julia Jones, Julia Lawrence, and Hanna Wells also participated in the school during this period.

Unlike Ojibwe lace makers in Minnesota, who made needlepoint lace, most Birch Coulee lace makers made bobbin lace, also called pillow lace. They made a variety of products for sale, including piano scarves, lampshades, and altar cloths. The St. Paul Globe reported in 1903 that one lace bedspread made by a Birch Coulee artist had sold for $500. It also claimed that the lacework from Minnesota was “classed with the best Native lace in the country.”

The lace-making schools at Birch Coulee and in other Minnesota reservations served an assimilating and Christianizing agenda that cast Native women as primitive. As an Episcopal Deaconess and missionary, Carter used the project to promote Christianity, “cleanliness,” and industry among Native women, in line with the US government's overall policies. The exploitation underlying the project made Sybil Carter wealthy while leaving relatively little money for the lace makers themselves. Although Carter did promote artistry in the form of lace, she prevented women at Birch Coulee from continuing the traditional Dakota arts of beadwork, quillwork, and pottery.

In spite of Carter’s paternalism, the creation and success of the school itself show the community’s agency over its own affairs. Lace-makers used their training to build economic self-sufficiency while maintaining their Dakota identity. Some, like those who presented to the Women’s Auxiliary Missionary Society in 1895, seized the opportunities provided by lace-making to travel and exhibit their work. They used the school as a site of community gathering, a place of education, and a source of employment. One writer noted in 1900 that the Birch Coulee women “take up the art with a strenuous desire to help themselves and their people.”

After 1910, there is little evidence of lacemaking at Birch Coulee, and the Sybil Carter Lace Association disbanded in 1926. Dakota women, however, continued to make art with traditional materials like beads, ribbons, quills, and hides. At the same time, they invented handicrafts in hybrid styles (miniature moccasins, beaded prayer-book covers) to sell to tourists. In this way, they built on Dakota traditions while continuing to provide the income that had helped their community during the lacemaking years.