Giant river cane was economically and culturally important to indigenous people, with uses including as a vegetable and materials for construction and craft production.

[2][3] This bamboo is a perennial grass with a rounded, hollow stem which can exceed 7 cm (2.8 in) in diameter and grow to a height of 10 m (33 ft).

Before European settlers colonized North America, Native American peoples throughout the southeastern United States used A. gigantea to build and craft tools, containers and artistic works, particularly baskets, which used complex techniques requiring great skill.

[11] The earliest European map of the region, created by John Filson, shows the northeastern part of the state as "a cane-covered savanna.

[13] A legend from the 1770s describes two men hunting in the same canebrake for days, each hearing another person nearby but not seeing each other, and assuming they were being stalked by an Indian; when they finally met, they were both so relieved that they embraced each other.

Land survey records from 1820 in Georgia indicate that a 17,250 acre tract in Taylor and Crawford counties, along the western side of the Flint River, was a canebrake "so vast and impenetrable that surveyors could find no trees on which to post their lot numbers.

"[15] In 1908, Teddy Roosevelt described cane growing to heights of fifteen to twenty feet in Louisiana, spaced only a few inches apart.

Other plants in the understory include inkberry (Ilex glabra), creeping blueberry (Vaccinium crassifolium), wax myrtle (Morella cerifera), blue huckleberry (Gaylussacia frondosa), pineland threeawn (Aristida stricta), cutover muhly (Muhlenbergia expansa), little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), and toothache grass (Ctenium aromaticum).

[9] The art of river cane basketry is also important to the Choctaw, whose artisans have faced similar problems due to the increasing disappearance of canebrakes.

[27] The cane was also used by groups such as the Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw to make medicine, blowguns, bows and arrows, knives, spears, flutes, candles, walls for dwellings,[24] fish traps, sleeping mats, tobacco pipes,[26] and food.

[29] Giant cane is of interest due to its extraordinary capability to reduce both sediment loss and nitrate runoff when planted as a "buffer" between waterways and agricultural fields.

[20] Stands of cane are superior even to forests as protective buffers around waterways, absorbing sediment and nitrate pollution and dramatically slowing the rate at which runoff enters the stream or river.