The Episcopal Church had championed the cause of Native American peoples in Minnesota since the middle of the 19th century. Henry Benjamin Whipple, the first Episcopalian bishop of Minnesota, had defied public opinion by protesting the shabby treatment of the Dakota before the Dakota Conflict of 1862 and by opposing the executions and deportations of the Dakota afterwards. Whipple visited the reservations in Minnesota regularly and used his church position to espouse Native American rights throughout the United States and Europe. It was Whipple who helped Carter establish a lace school at the White Earth Indian Indian Reservation, an effort that was soon expanded to include lace schools on the Red Lake and Leech Lake Reservations. Pauline Colby, the lace teacher for the Leech Lake Reservation for three decades, lived first at Old Agency and then at Onigum, two settlements on the reservation.

     While there are many different kinds of lace, an especially popular lace in the 19th century was Battenburg lace. It is a needle lace produced with machine-made tapes, which are attached to a pattern with beginning stitches. The tapes are then connected with a needle and the spaces are filled by the needle lace stitches. Lace making as a revenue source declined with the increasing success of machine made laces.
Text by Erin Dinsmore