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I mean maybe. If you count little seedlings or such. there was this thing about how a squirrel could go from one ocean to the other without ever touching the ground. I mean the logging practices prior to the settlers landing on plymouth rock were pretty anemic. I mean the natives had few buildings. All our towns and cities and buildings in general were for the most part forest or prarie and even prarie had trees especially long water sources like lakes and rivers.
You've been told a racist lie. Native Americans -- especially ones in the forested parts of the country -- had plenty of agriculture, and at its peak in the 12th Century, Cahokia (the largest city we know about north of Mesoamerica) may have had a larger population than London or Paris did at the time.
What actually happened was that the natives caught old-world diseases from the earliest explorers and colonists, which set off a continent-wide pandemic so virulent that, by a few decades later when the European settlers really started showing up in earnest, something like 90-99% of them were dead and their towns had been reclaimed by nature.
Two things:
Native peoples very much built buildings.
Lots of where towns are now in the south and in the plains weren’t prairie as is commonly thought, they were lowlands populated with bamboo.
TIL not all bamboo is from Asia. Is there a good/easy way to tell Arundinaria apart from invasive bamboo? There's a vacant lot near my house with a ton of bamboo on it, and your comment gives me a slim hope that it might be something other than a noxious weed that needs remediation.
I often find that due to where I grew up I learned about things, like the Tulsa race massacre for instance, that others didn’t. In this case, the cultural center run by my tribal government regularly has demonstrations on how my tribe used river cane. Including for things like basket weaving, blow guns, flutes, and even sticks for an early version of what would eventually become lacrosse.
Where I grew up, giant river cane specifically is being cultivated and reintroduced for Native purposes and is now not totally uncommon to find near the local rivers and streams. I don’t know how to tell them apart, but it’s entirely possible that that’s what’s near you too depend depending on where you are.
It's a stream bank in an urban neighborhood, so it's probably Asian stuff some idiot upstream previously put in their yard for ornamental purposes. But it's in the Southeast, so it could be native.
On a related note, the A. gigantea article mentions use by the Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw specifically. My city used to be Muskogee Creek territory (I think). Given that they were neighbored by and related to those other tribes (in terms of language etc.), is it safe to assume they'd have been making stuff out of it, too?
I can only speak for the Cherokees but as far as I know all of the tribes from the southeast including the Mvskoke (Creek) used cane as a building and crafting material. These tribes also traded these objects and materials worldwide. This is why traditional Cherokee dress from the early 19th century includes a turban and kurta. (See picture of Sequoyah.)
ok. So just to be clear we just care about if there are technically more trees like saplings in tree farms than any type of environmental thing yeah?
No? I care about accurate representations of Native American environments. My comment was specifically directed at your comment, not the entire thread.
I honestly think there’s no way to know if there’s really more trees now than there was. But I kind of doubt it, unless like you said, we’re specifically counting saplings on farms versus old growth forests.
Sorry I thought you were followup by the initial starter of the comment chain.