Eva Bigwitch, a Cherokee, weaves baskets so graceful that they are featured in several mountain stores and museums. The Cherokee Indians were the first native North Carolinians, occupying the land for thousands of years. While they still live throughout North Carolina, they are most concentrated in the western mountains, especially along the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians. Their culture is rich with crafts, stories and traditions of living that cannot be matched by today's society. They weaved baskets and made pottery before the first English settlers even landed on the North American continent.

In Folkways Traditions of the Cherokee, you will meet some of these ancient masters who have held onto the old traditions. Amanda Swimmer demonstrates how to form and carve pottery into beautiful vases and bowls--all without the use of a pottery wheel. Eva Bigwitch has been making baskets since she was a child and uses rivercane, which she prepares by hand, dyes and then weaves into intricate designs that she cannot explain how to create. Walker Calhoun shows students at the Earthskills workshops in Georgia how to make a blowgun from rivercane and a dart from thistle and twigs, as Darry Wood interprets his movements. Amanda, Eva and Walker learned the traditions from watching their elders, teaching their children the traditions that are so dear to them. Although Walker plays songs to a banjo, an instrument not native to the Cherokee, he remembers the ancient Cherokee songs and dances and invites the Earthskills workshop students to participate in them with him. As the story concludes, Cherokee men and women talk about wishing to honor not just the traditions themselves, but the spirit behind them and the connection to the elements of the earth.