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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.”

Leslie Perrin Wilson is a local historian and writer living in Taos, New Mexico. She spent her working life in special collections and archives, retiring in 2019 after twenty-three years as Curator of the Concord (Massachusetts) Free Public Library. In retirement, she has been drawn to the life stories of ordinary women. Her recent books include “This Is the Life”: The Diary of Jennie McLeod (2020) and Mid-Century Chic: The Fashion Illustrations of Lucia Perrin (2022). A transplant to New Mexico, Wilson delights in exploring the people, landscape, and history of her new home.

“Historian Leslie Perrin Wilson gives and teaches much in her stirring account of the modestly-lived life of Southwestern textile artist and teacher Ellen Lawrence, Much to Learn, Much to Give. Reading between the lines of Bureau of Indian Affairs employment records and publications and scant but telling periodical sources, Wilson has constructed a narrative that spans two crucial eras in Native American history, moving from cruelly enforced ‘assimilation’ to preservation and recovery, with Lawrence, an Anglo, serving as bridge almost in spite of herself. This is a nuanced tale told with wit and sensitivity by an impressively able scholar and writer.” —Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart

Hardcover:
6 x 9, illustrated
ISBN: 978-1-63293-773-5
204 pp.,$36.95

Softcover:
6 x 9, illustrated
ISBN: 978-1-63293-772-8
204 pp.,$26.95