Much to Learn, Much to Give

Born in 1871, married in 1896, Ellen Lawrence was a skilled needleworker and craftswoman. She ultimately turned her facility with handicrafts into a means of financial support. She entered the United States Indian Service in 1915 as a teacher of lace-making to Native Americans in southern California and learned Pueblo embroidery and weaving in New Mexico while living and working among the Native people at Jemez. During the early to mid-1930s, a period of heightened interest in Native designs and techniques, she taught traditional Indian crafts at the Albuquerque Indian School. Despite her position in the flawed federal Indian school system, hers is a story of evolution toward cultural appreciation and preservation. Ellen Lawrence's work had a profound effect on her students at the Pueblos. Among them was award-winning Jemez Pueblo artist Lucy Yepa Lowden, one of Lawrence's students and later her assistant and then her successor at the Albuquerque Indian School. Lowden memorialized Lawrence in a poem which appears on a display wall inside the heritage center at the Jemez Historic Site that includes the lines, "You are also great people / with much to learn, / much to give."