Nancy Basket - Cherokee

Partial Transcript: Hi. I’m Nancy Basket, and I’ve lived in Walhalla, South Carolina for at least seventeen years. I lived for a while in Union, South Carolina, but I’m really from Washington state.
Growing up in Washington state, Yakima—in the desert, we had a nation of people called the Yakama, and the city is called Yakima too. So quite a few years ago, they separated the city from the nation, and they changed the spelling. So you know if you’re in the city or if you’re a part of the nation, but I wasn’t a part of the Yakama people. My dad is Cherokee. Way back, a grandmother is named Margaret Basket, and my mother is German. One of the stories out there, when I was a little bit older and had children, is that when you are a good basket maker, you take the name of one of your ancestors. So I took Margaret Basket as my last name, and that’s who I will be for the rest of my life.

Partial Transcript: I am a Cherokee descendant, and my dad left when I was a little girl. I listened to my grandmother’s stories, and she would tell me of the relatives in Oklahoma, but she was quite silent about who we were. My mom told her the story that when I was born my grandmother cried because I was darker than everybody else, and so she said that they would know I was Cherokee and they couldn’t hide it anymore. So I grew up with that. I’m the oldest of four, and I’m dark, and then, there’s a light one and a dark one—and it causes problems in the family as you grow older sometimes. The United States government has a way of saying a full-blood Native person marries into another nation—their kids are only one-half. The one-half child marries out of the nation again—they’re only a quarter. This is what some of us feel is cultural genocide, and a lot of us don’t believe that. If we are any Native American at all, then we will always be, and our children will be as well, but if you can’t prove that by bloodline, or if you don’t want to take a DNA test, or you don’t want to fall in with a government expectation, some of us don’t do that. So our lives are not the same when we’re descendants as if we would be living on the reservations.
The reservation in Cherokee I wanted to come closer to, to come back to ancestral homeland because my relatives are from Oklahoma, but when you come out here you find that the “I am, you’re not” exclusivity is pretty predominant. I don’t know if that’s to guard the casino money that some of them get. That’s not what the rest of us are for. I’ve always been interested in stories. I always listen to the relatives tell the stories. My whole life is a story. Is it made up? Who knows? But some of life is more spiritual than you can prove. Prove spirit. Prove faith. Prove love. Prove any of this. It doesn’t matter. We are led by ideas or stories or the Creator himself to certain places so that we can learn the rest of who we’ve always been. We spend our lives doing for the people, getting more knowledge, and helping erase some of the stereotypes so the world can be a better place, and we can live more in balance and harmony, and we won’t fight with each other all the time!

Partial Transcript: To some people, it means knowing the language, and I was never a part of that. It means being raised in a certain place, or for some of us it means coming home to what we know is our place. To me, it was about finding the elders so I could learn the stories of respect to teach to my children. I looked for a long time until they found me. Again, the who is accepted and who’s not, who lives close, who doesn’t, that figures into—well, who are your elders? If we’d go back to the way we used to treat each other, it was with great respect, and anybody older than us is an elder. There’s a difference between being a wise elder and just being old. There is a difference in taking groups of people and becoming the guru, the leader—the one that everybody looks up to for the answers, and if they don’t have the answers, now what do you do? So I find myself not joining any organizations but trying to help all of them the best that we can so that we can come together as a Native people. Like we are here at this powwow so that we can learn with each other without judgment, but we’re doing this respectfully—a little at a time, with a lot of humor. Here’s my story. What’s your story? And that’s what’s important to me.

Partial Transcript: I love for non-Natives to come and ask questions. When I’ve been up there telling stories, that’s more edutainment, and if we were telling these stories in smaller groups, everyone would be able to add their perspective. What do you see from this? If it’s a child, they’re going to see one thing. As you grow older and you hear the stories again, you’re in a different place, you see something special or something that stands out to you at that time. What I see the value of being here is that we can learn with other after we are with each other for a while, and we can understand what your spirit is like. Are you here to tell me that your way is the only way? That I should listen to you and change spiritual affiliation or religion? Are you here to perpetuate old knowledge, or will you listen in a good way to what we need to end? We’re trying to bring all of our people up together so that nobody reigns supreme. It should have never been a hierarchy. It’s a “raise everybody up together.” That’s what we can do here, a little at a time. You come back next year, you’re going to learn something else. Some of the things that you’ll learn in the circle hopefully will be a bit controversial. Good! What does that spark? It’s okay to be different. We don’t have to be like we’re told on television, by psychologists and psychiatrists paid lots of money to be like everybody else or you’re nobody, and that’s what these kids get when they’re little and they get to have a place where they’re not so different—where it’s okay to be who we are, and then, we have to go back to school and kind of blend in, because if not we’re picked on.

Partial Transcript: Okay. The matrilineal connection. So what I was going to say about history and matriarchy—what you learn in school is more Eurocentric, and it’s male-dominated because they were the ones that write the books. So they tell you about who fought what wars—always an Indian war. They never tell you the other side of that story—what caused that in the first place? How would you feel if your land was taken away, and you come home one night from school and they said you have to get the heck outa here? You don’t own this anymore because we want it. The matrilineal part is everything else in the world besides war, and that’s what kept us together most of the time, but you only know the bad stuff. What were the songs? What were the stories? What were the ways that the moms helped the children learn while their dads were out? In most of our Native societies, you might have to work 5 hours a day being a guy, going and getting some food, and the women did the gardening and the planting. We were responsible for knowing when we were getting low on something—hey guys, can you go out and hunt? Because you don’t just bring back a whole bunch of deer and a bear—you know, for grease, ’cause we didn’t have olive trees back in that day. ’Cause if you plop it all in front of the women and expect us to take care of it, you’re going to get an earful!
So that’s where the matriarch comes in, and it’s the softer side—the feminine side—and our women today don’t have to demand things. There’s a softer way to do that. Today, we fight. Fight is in every word or every other word that we say, and words have great power. What is our world right now? We’re all about fighting, and everybody is mad at everybody else. Well, who’s in charge, for heaven’s sake? The men? Back in the day, we grandmothers were the ones who would tell the men in Council when they could go to war. If we didn’t have enough to feed the kids, if we didn’t think—we women had the last say. We don’t know. When Benjamin Franklin came to the Haudenosaunee people, formerly called Iroquois—they don’t want to be called that anymore, but we all have names for ourselves. When he went out there, they gave him the rules that kept them together. Well, if you ask a Haudenosaunee, they’ll say, Hey—you Cherokee. You came from us. If you ask us Cherokee, it’s like, Hey—you Haudenosaunee came from—well, we were one big group, okay? We can agree on that. Tell me what I was talking about again.

It’s changed because the women don’t have the same time-out. We would take a time-out once a week, every single month, and we’d hang out together, and we would learn how our energy affected everybody and how important a woman was. So we have to be very careful about what our last word is. We don’t do this. We don’t take the time and care with people anymore that we used to. We’re microwaving everything, and that’s not the way that we were meant to live. We are meant to be out here where time is slower when you can tell that this willow tree was used for aspirin once. There were more natural ways that would take effect a little slower, and our medicine people would know these ways, but when the Natives started trading with everybody else, we started forgetting and losing what we did with each other. We didn’t count on each other anymore. In fact, we don’t teach our children the same things. Back in the day we didn’t, because if we did we wouldn’t need each other anymore. Do we need each other now? I think that we do. I think that people of all spirits—the good people, the open-minded people that want to know from each other—how is your belief system like ours? How was it back in the day? What can we do now to support each other? I’m not asking to be a convert. Why do people want to be Native anyway? Do they think that we’re still back in the day, and that’s where history leaves the kids, and so the small children I worked with a couple days ago—are you a real Indian? Well, there’s a long answer to that and a short answer, okay? It would depend. Are you going to listen to the United States government? Are you going to come and learn what you can? Yeah! But here they get a chance to ask their questions. It doesn’t matter how old they are or what they really don’t understand.

Partial Transcript: Ha! For the last twenty-four years, I’ve been allowed to go into the public school system, and I have worked with children, kindergarten through high school. I’m still doing these residencies as an artist and education for South Carolina. I was given the great privilege through Chief Hatcher here at the Waccamaw people of receiving the 2005 Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award for Cherokee baskets. I usually don’t talk about things like that ’cause we’re not supposed to talk about ourselves, but what other people say about us—oh, you know, take that—grain of salt. I lost myself again.
So what I do is I go into the school systems, and the children can make a pine needle basket with me, if they’re older, or kudzu. ’Cause kudzu is invasive, you know, and it comes from a different country. It’s not indigenous. Hey, but if you can take it and turn it into other things that are easier for the kids to understand the basics—what is weaving? Over something and under something. Then, they can create a bird’s nest basket, and at the end of four days with me, they get four jellybeans. The guys will make a big eagle nest because they think they’re going to get a whole bag of jellybeans, and the little girls sometimes have a delicate, little, lacy basket that they took so long on, and they’re really sad ’cause they’re not going to get very many jellybeans. Well, you all get four. Who cares? You worked for four days. When the children’s hands are full of useful doing, and they don’t have to wait very long with a lecture—then we can start talking about things. Ask me questions. What about the mascot issue? How do you feel about that? Things that are important right now, because they bring that home. They ask. This is how we will change the future. What I’ve been doing for the past twenty-four years—do I have to see the fruits of my labor? No. I just have to keep planting seeds of respect.

Partial Transcript: Our ancestors went through great pain and suffering, literally being killed for keeping our records secret. Some of our people told the stories to those who took their Eurocentric understanding and put on top of them, and they butchered the stories, they took things out—oh, it’s just for entertainment anyway. They didn’t understand the medicine in the story. A lot of the traditionals don’t like that. Some of us—at that time when they were collecting these stories in the Smithsonian, especially a guy named Mooney—some of the Cherokee people told him crazy stories ’cause he gave ’em money. That’s funny on the one hand, but if you forget the old stories, you believe that the changed stories are the truth, and it doesn’t put us in a very good light. That’s why we need the elder people. They were here longer, and the ones who are ninety-six shared some of those stories before they left. They wanted somebody to hold onto them again. Some of our children are in so much trouble trying to be like everybody else, trying to fit in that they don’t care about the stories, and then, when it’s too late, we’re gone. Or they don’t believe us, or they don’t care—or you can’t prove this, you can’t prove that. So they get mad at us. Like, the story I was telling, and they run out of the roundhouse, and then, they go their own way. It makes us older people sad, and I’m not even that old. If you’re seventy or eighty—hey, you’ve arrived!

Partial Transcript: We are different people, and our stories tell us how to behave. We need to share those stories again, and I’ve been given permission to do that, as long as they’re not written down or recorded. Because somebody could say—oh, this is a story from Nancy Basket—and I’ve never met ’em before. They don’t have permission. We’ve got to be very careful about cultural misappropriation. Some stories are only for certain people to tell at certain times, and all of our 650 cultures of Native people were different with our 250 different languages, and they’re all right. One nation doesn’t have the right to tell—oh, you can go ahead and tell—you can do this, you can do that. It depends on the elders. Even if we don’t agree with them, we listen to them. It’s important to keep the culture alive because maybe one day my grandchildren look at me differently than my children do. They’re tired of being different, but the grandchildren don’t know the difference, and they might want to know who they are or who I was. So maybe I’ll write these things down and leave it to them to find someday, should they care, and if not, then they’ll go into the dust. But I think any good story that tells us how to behave with a little bit of humor and a little bit of personal perspective here is a good way to start any conversation, and that’s how we’re going to keep our nation together is through conversation.

Partial Transcript: Once the old stories die, the old traditions, then your culture is not the same anymore. If you make a soup out of chocolate and garlic and sweet things and a little bit of Asian hot sauce and a banana or two, how good is it really going to taste? There’s a danger of people’s ego—I want to be the leader. Come listen to me ’cause I know it, and I’ve taken some of this, and I’ve taken some of that because I can make money with it. We’re really careful to guard against that, and I feel that that’s what some of the metaphysical people are doing. On the other hand, I do like Ancient Aliens, the show on television that shows us a different perspective of culture—of stories and how our stories compare. So why can’t we sit down as little groups of individuals and compare the story and see where that could take us? Some of our history or our traditions can change to a certain extent, but it’s up to the elders at that time in each nation to tell us when that is. Some of the younger kids might want to do other things and combine other philosophies, and for them personally, that’s fine, but as a culture itself it would change everything, and we’d all vanish into a melting pot. That’s what the United States was supposed to be, but I love the way that you can sample different cultures. You’ve got the people preparing the food from which you’re eating or the celebration from what it comes from. You can’t just wake up one day and want to be Jewish. That’s kinda hard to do. You’ve got to have the rabbis. You’ve got to have the teaching. You’ve got to have the history.
You know, it’s pretty hard to do to wake up one morning and say you want to be Jewish and just go out and read a few books. Now you’re Jewish? There has to be some lineage somewhere. There is a great quote from Martin Prechtel, and he’s Pueblo Native and non-Native, down in New Mexico. He has Bolad’s Kitchen. What he has done is distilled a lot of different cultures and the stories down to the essence. What is the seed? What is the kernel that will grow the people in the future? I’ll get that quote and maybe read that because I think it’s very important for us to understand. Native people have intermarried here for more than five hundred years, so we’re lighter or we’re darker, and we have all these other cultures. How do we fit that in and dance together in a circle? Sometimes the Native people will dance because they know the steps to that. You can’t just get in there and do whatever you want to. There’s a certain protocol, a certain respect, a certain way you conduct yourself, but in the intertribal dances, get out there and hop to it because it’s different, but it’s inclusive. But you sure can’t put on any clothes you want and dress up like an Indian—I don’t even like using that word—and do what you want to out there because this is our culture. You’re coming in, and you’re wanting to learn with us. Well, maybe if somebody takes the time, or you have several years for us to work with you, then you could be a part of us. Are you ever going to have the bloodline? Maybe not, but for a lot of us who are more inclusive, it’s where is your heart coming from? And that might take us awhile for us to work with you and to be around you before we tell you much of anything at all.

Partial Transcript: The elders told me that back in the day, a long, long time ago, we had thirteen clans plus one for the spiritual leaders, and one of the clans was a Turtle Clan. The Turtle Clan, to my knowledge, was the last clan. You’d go into the big meeting area, the Council House, in order, and the Turtles were always the last. So you have these stories where Turtle wants to be big and great, and he pumps himself up because he doesn’t get to go in first ever. If you know the cultural context there, you can see the significance in the story that I tell, ’cause he gets his turtle shell all cracked, but he takes care of himself, but he’s a medicine person, and he has a job to do. The jobs that we used to do in our clans were good enough back then ’cause everybody had a job, and everybody was appreciated, and nobody was better than anybody else. It’s not like that now, and some of us have assimilated and want to be greater than we are.

I’m just a basketmaker. I don’t know where 0:30:59.3 (???) (inaudible) comes from. I don’t know that Margaret Basket was a basket maker, but I don’t believe in coincidences either. I’ve always been interested in what is outside, and how can that be used. When my friend showed me, about thirty-five years ago, I knew it was something I’d do for the rest of my life. So the stories that you run into when you’re little and when you’re growing up—it takes you a long time to know who you are and what you want to do, unless you have something like this to go to. This is a modern invention, but it’s the best that we have for now—getting a lot of people together so we can begin to filter out the people who want to do it their way, by any means necessary, and those who have heart and who want to help contribute in some way. I believe that when you are a spiritual person, the Creator puts you in touch with people like this.
for the Cherokee people, turtles were worn by the women and the box turtles—they live to be about seventy years old, so we don’t go out and kill them—you know, just to make a rattle. In fact, the women now will use pop cans. I’m from the North, so I say pop, but they’ll cover the pop cans with cloth, and inside will be the beans for the shakers, because we were the percussion in our dances, and turtles were honored and women wore the turtles. The men could use the gourds, and it’s a balance of male and female energy. They would do the drumming. We’d stand behind. There are different reasons why the turtles would be used for the women for putting the umbilical cord in, but it would be a lizard for a boy. So there are different kinds of long life. Male and female have their different roles to play. They don’t have to be one up or the same, and we do this lovingly and kindly. There’s Turtle Island. That comes from a Haudenosaunee story ’cause we don’t all have all of our stories intact, so we kinda listen to somebody else—oh yeah, we were each other. Well, you’ve got this story—oh, I’ve got this story. We’ve got stories where we kinda kidnap each other ’cause back in the day that was acceptable, you know? There are reasons behind why that would happen. Oh, the Chickasaw and the Cherokee—the Choctaw and the—oh. You know? We’re connected.
So the story of Turtle Island is Sky Woman and Sky Man are up in Creation together. She has a dream, ’cause we know that dreams are very important. You have to really listen to them. They tell you about things that you’re going to do, things that you need to do, and she dreamed that the Tree of Life was pulled up. She wakes up. She’s heavy with child, and the Tree is pulled up. She holds onto the seeds of this tree. She looks down into the hole, and she falls in. Then, in some versions of the story, Swan carries her down to the Earth, and there’s water. She has to bring the water up, and sometimes that’s on the back of a turtle, so we call the earth Turtle Island. We have lots of different stories about this. It’s long living. We’ve gotta take care of the Earth because it’s a living being. So I honor turtles, whether they’re swimming over here in the Atlantic or whether a young boy brings me that spotted turtle he had that can live in the water and live on the land. They can live a long time, and I appreciate when what happens in reality mirrors the stories that we tell, and here’s an opportunity to tell this young boy what the turtle means, and this is how we relate it back again to how important it is to learn the culture and to learn that everything around us is living and deserves respect.

Partial Transcript: When we lose our connection to our families and the past, we’re lost. I had a couple women come up to me, and they said, We heard your stories. We’re lost. We have the story of this Cherokee grandmother, but she wasn’t married to the non-Native person, but she gave them the children because she wanted to go back, but we can’t prove it. We don’t know her name. We just heard the story, and we’re attracted. We want to know something. Can you share a story with us? Can you give us a place to start? And it’s a connection. It’s a connection to the earth. It’s a connection to the spiritual, and people are looking for that. Hey, not all of us Native people have that, you know? There’s not one nation in the world that’s always all right, and everybody else is all wrong. I think that that’s the thinking that we need to stop and learn how to coexist with each other, and it starts from me with a story.

Partial Transcript: In this world now of global consumerism, we Cherokees say that greed was the first sin. A lot of us are understanding that. We feel that the world might change drastically. We’re in an upheaval with all this war for such a long time that we’re hungry for something that’s spiritual. Maybe if people think that we Natives got it—hey, good. Come on out. You’re gonna learn something, but you’re sure not gonna learn everything. But when we come together, we’ll be all these races, and maybe we’ll sit down with each other and talk and find out how our stories are similar. Let’s not worry about the differences. Let’s see how we can be the same. What does your story say? What does your story say? Oh, how wonderful. What do you get from that? Well, what do you get from this? How can that make our life better? We’re looking for something that’s not in a pill bottle or to drink from or to shoot up or to something because that’s not working anymore. I believe that having a loving and kind heart will get you a lot farther than looking for something that’s a quick fix. Yes, come to a powwow. That’s a great first start!

Partial Transcript: A long time ago, when prosperity came from the ground, and we all knew how to grow our own food, how we learned to work with our neighbors in smaller communities—that was a time that maybe people are understanding is important to get back to that. The problem is that we can’t. We live in cities. We rely on too much stuff from stores, and if they would close, we’d all—a lot of us would die. We’d die because, number one, we wouldn’t know how to go out in the field and what to eat at any given time. Number two, you couldn’t get out of the city to get to the woods, and if you did, it would be polluted. You can’t just drink from the stream. You have to know how to take care of yourself again. Maybe people feel that Native people still know how to do that. Nah! We don’t, you know? Not all of us. We have to learn from everybody. There are people from all cultures that know how to do this, and I think it would be very good for kids to learn this so they would not have to be afraid, like some of us adults are. Where are you going after this again?
Getting back to a sustainable lifestyle depends on all of our cultures sitting down and finding out what we know together. When you go to a Native community, it doesn’t mean that they know how to take care of each other either. We have really serious problems going on on a lot of the reservations and the boundaries where groups of Native people are too. Going and forming your own community and starting that up as though you were Native, or at least based on some of the principles—that doesn’t always work either because we think differently. We’re so independent anymore, we really don’t know how to get along with each other. We really don’t know how to respect people that are older than us that might have a different idea, and maybe we don’t do everything the way that the younger people would want us to do, but we are who we are. We’ve lived in this society for a long time too. We’re not all perfect. We’re never all going to be all perfect, but if we come to a place where we can at least learn or ask how we can get back to this. Maybe we can find out the groups that are getting together twice a month like Earth Skills that I’ve gone to for twenty-eight years, and they teach all these kinds of skills. You’re not going to get them at a powwow because that’s a different deal. Sometimes you’ll have demonstrators, and we can show you certain things but not all of them, and just because you’re shown doesn’t mean that you’ve had the time to learn. So what it is, is I believe that we all need to know how to take care of ourselves out in the woods. At least, go out, walk in a park. Go see a waterfall. Get away from the television and technology. Yes, it can teach us some good things, but our kids are too much in that realm, and it is a different energy field. They’re not being supported the way that they need to. So again, coming out here and finding somebody who will invest some time with you, answering questions. That’s a good first start.

Partial Transcript: A long, long time ago, Possum was in a tree eating persimmons. Now he loved persimmons, and he knew when to eat ’em—when they were floppity like jelly. ’Cause if you bite into one of those that you’ve never seen in a grocery store—because we don’t have the wild ones there—if you eat ’em when they’re not floppity like jelly, your mouth puckers up like this. I think it’s alum in there or something! But the Possum in the tree knew when to eat ’em, and he had a friend too. His friend was Turtle, and Turtle couldn’t climb up that tree. So Possum was throwing the persimmons down, and Turtle was eating ’em. They were happy, and they were friends. Wolf came along, and Wolf wasn’t invited, and Possum got mad at the Wolf and said, “We didn’t want you here! You’re eating the persimmons, and you’re not giving them to my friend. You’re greedy!” and he got all mad. The Possum decided to put a stick inside the persimmon, and the next time that the Wolf would grab it, he thought that the stick would open his mouth like this, and the Wolf wouldn’t be able to eat him, you know? The Turtle comes out, and he sees the Wolf grabbing the persimmons, and he gets scared, and he ducks down in his shell, and he hides. Well, the Possum threw that stick-laden persimmon down to the Wolf and the Wolf caught it, and it stuck down in his throat, and it didn’t keep his mouth open. It choked him, and the Wolf died, and the Possum knew he was in trouble. So the Possum left. The Turtle gets up out of his shell and can’t find his friend anywhere, looks around, and there’s this dead Wolf. He goes, “Whoa. I’m really tough. I’m a warrior! I killed a Wolf in my shell! Man, this is going to make a great story!” and so, he cuts off the Wolf’s ears. He takes them home, and he turns them into spoons with long handles. Now this is for him going to houses.
First, he takes his relatives that he knows really well, and he tells them about how wonderful a warrior is. In our culture, when you come to our door, we’re going to feed you. Whether we like you or not, we’re going to feed you. So this Turtle is telling all his exploits about how hard it was to kill this wolf, and he just made stuff up, and all of his relatives fed him and listened, and they compared notes, and they knew that that’s not what happened. Then, the Turtle took his story to different homes of strangers. After he got finished with all them, and he went home, the Wolves surrounded that Turtle and they said, Turtle, we heard that you killed our brother Wolf, and you didn’t use his ears well. You didn’t honor or respect him. Turtle said, “It worked for me,” and they said, We’re gonna take you, Turtle, and we’re going to throw you into that cooking pot over there, and we’re going to have turtle soup. The Turtle had to think really quick, and he said, “Go ahead. Throw me into that pot over there. My feet are so strong, I’ll kick the pot to pieces. The water will rush out, put the fire out, and I won’t be harmed at all.” The Wolves said We’re not gonna do that to you, then. We’re going to—and they talked to each other. We’re going to take you, Turtle, and throw you off the cliff, and that was one of the ways—I’ve been told that the Cherokee would throw you off a cliff, and it was a very dishonorable death, and it was only for murder or another horrible crime. You could play stickball if you wanted to be honorable. They weren’t honoring the turtle at all, so they were going to throw him off the cliff. He said, “Fine. Go ahead. Throw me off the cliff. My turtle shell is so strong, I’ll bounce.” They said, We’re not going to do that to you, then.

They started arguing and mumbling among themselves, and they couldn’t decide what they were going to do to this Turtle, so they said, Turtle, what don’t you want us to do to you? The Turtle said, “Don’t throw me in the water ’cause if you do, I’ll drown!” So they said, Good! They picked the Turtle up and threw him as hard as they could into the river, not so far away, and they didn’t know that there was a rock in the middle and that Turtle cracked his shell. He cracked his shell so hard he had to put himself together. He had to sew himself together by saying special words in Cherokee. When he got up, he left his shell cracked so we would remember the story of how not to make our exploits larger than life itself. How not to talk about ourselves at all!

Okay. The shell, to this day, has thirteen great big cracks on it, and they stand for the thirteen full moons that we have every year, not just twelve, and they stand for the thirteen clans that we Cherokee had plus the one. It tells our children how to behave. It tells our adults how to behave. Always we have this lesson in front of us, and a good storyteller—if you’re getting out of line, he or she will pull you aside and tell you a story, and you just sit there. Back in our culture, we would know that we’re acting like Jistu the rabbit, who never learns and never remembers, and you have to be a story so that he can be told how to behave.

Partial Transcript: Longleaf and this is what we would use traditionally here in the South, but the foresters got a better idea, and they planted loblolly because they thought it was going to take less time, and they could have more, many. Then, they found out that they destroyed the red-cockaded woodpecker home. They could only live in Longleaf after it’s almost dead. They peck holes in it, and the sap runs out so the snakes can’t get up and eat their babies. They can’t do that in a loblolly. So they’re starting to reforest again with Longleaf. Of which I’m very grateful.

Partial Transcript: The federally recognized nations want to keep their status. They’re not going to recognize anyone else because we don’t have enough bloodline. They bought into the federal government. They’ve assumed or are assimilated in that respect. There’s a way here in South Carolina of proving your lineage as a group back a hundred years. There are many groups here now that are state recognized, and Chief Hatcher and Chief Norris have been instrumental in being with that commission for years. They stand for making political changes, and that’s a very hard arena. That’s more of a warrior arena. I’m not going to enter politics, ’cause I’m a woman of peace, and there are other things to do besides—and that’s a battle. You can’t get people to listen to you. Being a chief is a very hard thing. Hey, being a storyteller, you’re always welcome, you know? Being a basket maker—hey, can you show me this? Yeah, sit down. I’ll show you.
No, they don’t because they’d have to share the casino money. There are too many people that want to be this or want to be that—or they were told by their families they were, but they could be somebody else—’cause we all had C names. I mean, it gets so precarious. So for those lost women, I just went up and hugged them, and I said, “Well, you’re found. You asked me a question. You’re welcome here,” and I gave them my e-mail address or my website, www.nancybasket.com, so if they needed to ask something else, they could have somebody that was inclusive that would listen to them.