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BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - Rose Fisher is looking for river cane.

“The cane has a sound to it. It makes that perfect sound that it’s ready to use,” said Fisher.

Fisher is an elder with the Jena Choctaw Tribe in the Village of Crayola in central Louisiana. She uses the cane to weave traditional baskets.

“The bigger the diameter, the more straws you’re gonna get off of it,” said Fisher.

The cane has to be split, peeled and dried before it can be woven into a basket.

“Things like this were probably made to eat food out of some kind of dried food, dried berries, dried nuts, or even to put it in there to dry it out. This is a almost a 200-year-old basket made by one of my ancestors,” Fisher said.

Fisher’s ancestors were able to find lots of river cane in the forested bottom lands of the state.

“And they make flutes out of this to make their own music,” said Fisher.

And she has a blow gun that was made by her grandfather for traditional hunting.

“It’s loaded on the big end and you point it at your target,” said Fisher.

But river cane is hard to find.

“We’re trying to bring it back for the Native Americans. For the Jena Choctaw, whomever else wants to use the cane for their tribal purposes,” David Moore of U.S. Forest Service said.

The U.S. Forest Service is planting river cane on one of its farms in the Kisatchie National Forest.

We had all of these cane breaks in river cane hundreds of years ago. What happened to all of it?

“Well, mainly agriculture and lack of burning. They stopped. They started digging it all up and turning the land into crop land, and that was pretty much the end of the river cane,” sad Moore.

This cane was planted a year ago. It will take 10 years to get large enough to help native tribes who once roamed the forests of Louisiana.

“Native American tribes have been here for at least the last 10,000 years. So here on the forest, we have a lot of Native American camp sites, village sites, places where people would camp while hunting game out on the forest here in the uplands for many thousands of years,” said Matt Helmer of U.S. Forest Service.

Why is saving these traditions, these skills, this culture, why is that so important to you?

“Because of the way I was raised, it’s my culture. It’s part of who I am. It it makes me have the connection I need with the earth,” said Fisher.

Regrowing river cane is a critical step for people whose past is connected to this land and who want to keep their traditions alive for the future.

More information on river cane and Louisiana’s Native tribes can be found on Heart of Louisiana’s website.

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