With last week's visit from Nancy Basket, a craftswoman and storyteller from Walhalla, South Carolina, the art classes of North Myrtle Beach Elementary School enjoyed the school year's final session of the Artists in Residence program. The program was made possible by a grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission.

"We are lucky to have her," said Dorothy Shillinglaw, who provides art instruction to almost 800 children at the school. "I'm very interested in what she does. She's taught me so much this week!"

Nancy Basket takes her name from her great-great-great-grandmother, a Cherokee woman named Margaret Basket. Like her ancestor, Basket seems to have found her destiny in her name: she has become a renowned basketmaker, using common materials to create functional works of art.

Born in the Pacific Northwest, the artisan began to learn her craft 20 years ago, taught by a friend. "After I made my first basket, I asked my family about the Cherokee stories, but they were kind of hush-hush." In her grandmother's day, explained Basket, children of active Native American tribes were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools. "That was the government's way of trying to make us assimilate," she said.

Basket moved to Walhalla, in the northwest corner of South Carolina, ten years ago. "I came here to learn the stories and traditions of the Cherokee people, so I could teach them to my children, and now to my grandchild," Basket explained. "I wanted to come back to a traditional Cherokee homeland."

Between 1838 and 1839, U.S. troops, enforcing the Federal Indian Removal Act of 1830, expelled the Cherokee nation from its home in North Georgia, driving tens of thousands toward Indian territory in Oklahoma. The 800-mile exodus would come to be known as "Nunna daul Tsuny", or the Trail of Tears.

About 1,000 Cherokee people escaped the roundup and fled to the mountains of southwestern North Carolina. They established a tribal government in 1868 in Cherokee, North Carolina, and are now known as the Eastern Band. Nancy Basket, settling in nearby Walhalla, began to learn her ancestral traditions from this small community.

"The stories I've learned, of respect for everything, I tell the children, and I weave them in with the baskets, a little bit of history, a little bit of language… It's planted like a seed, so that it takes root and grows," said Basket.

Her baskets are coiled and sewn together, with a technique similar to that used by coastal South Carolina's African-Americans to create sweetgrass baskets. According to Basket, this technique was also used by North America's indigenous peoples. "Native Americans have lived on this continent for over 30,000 years, and they made coiled baskets, too."

During her visit to North Myrtle Beach Elementary, Basket led the children in an outdoor search for raw materials to weave. "We couldn't find any kudzu, so we're using wisteria. We've also used palmetto leaves, pine needles, cattail leaves, and bulrush. I tell them, 'Just because you know how to work with one material doesn't mean that you'll be able to find it in your own yard. You've got to be able to adapt.'"

The baskets created by the North Myrtle students over the four-day period come in a variety of sizes and shapes; Basket encourages individuality and persistence. "I make the children start at the center of a basket," she said. "It's the hard part. But I want them to understand how important it is to finish something that they start."

Mitchell Holmes, a fifth-grader, agreed. "It's kind of hard, but you catch on after a while," he said as he labored to push a needle threaded with raffia through the wisteria in his basket.

Though she has only been in the United States since December, fifth-grader Stefanie Guerrero learned to make a basket during the classes, and was eager to talk about her experience using her new English skills. "I like it because it's fun. But it's hard because my hands hurt!" she said.

The Artists in Residence program has helped expose the students of North Myrtle Beach Elementary School to several unfamiliar cultures and art forms. Earlier in the school year, the students enjoyed visits from sculptor Patz Fowler and folk dancer Sylvia Rex. "We have selected people with skills we're not familiar with, so that we can teach them to the kids," said Shillinglaw.

Basket made the five-hour trek from Walhalla to the North Strand with her daughter and apprentice, Joleen Oh, age 17. As the teenager helped the children with their baskets, she also worked on an intricate creation of her own, in pine needles and her own signature black fern stitch. Oh estimated that she would spend about 14 hours on the basket. "It's been calling my name constantly!" she said.

As the apprentice of a master artisan, Joleen Oh has some impressive shoes to fill. Nancy Basket helped form the first basketry guild in the country. Her work is featured in collections in the U.S. and abroad. She contributed two important chapters to Natural Baskets, a recent book on the art, and she also created baskets for "The Last of the Mohicans", the 1992 film, and the "Young Indiana Jones" television series.

Though not quite yet two, Basket's granddaughter Jaidre, who accompanied Basket and her aunt Joleen to class, can already split kudzu vines and is learning how to make paper. Basket says the skills she teaches can be learned even by the youngest children. "They learn by doing, by touching and holding and telling."

Using bales of kudzu, the resourceful Basket recently finished building a workshop behind her home in Walhalla. This marks Basket's final season as a visiting artist for schools around the state; soon she will begin conducting training sessions in her kudzu workshop, instructing teachers on the arts of papermaking, basketry, and Native American storytelling.

As important as the basketry she teaches, storytelling is a critical aspect of Basket's sessions with the children. "We have to learn that all things are connected," she said. "We are using our relatives, the trees, to build baskets. I am hoping that we can fill them up again with stories of respect for each other."