While many films and other media portray North America as a "wilderness" when the first colonists arrive...is that true? The continent was populated by hundreds of thousands of Native American groups, with some large conurbations like Cahokia in the midwest and many other mound-based settlements involving large earthworks. Many of these groups farmed as well as hunted, which suggests (to me at least) that they would have cleared fields. Did the colonists take advantage of this native infrastructure?
If by "Native American" you mean any indigenous denizens of the Americas rather then just the groups that inhabted what is now the United states, then yes.
In Mesoamerica (the cultural region which covers the bottom 2/3'sof Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and bits of El Salvador and Honduras, and is home to groups such as the Aztec and Maya), the majority of colonial town and settlements evolved out of existing towns and cities: You will note how in Mexico today, there are many names for neighborhoods, municipalities, towns, cities, and states with rather odd names which clearly aren't Spanish: Such as Tlaxcala, Xochmilco, Oaxaca, etc: Generally speaking, these are words from Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and represent the original names for these locations.
In many cases, the original architecture was re-used: There's many examples of existing temples and buildings being torn down, and their materials repurposed to build the structure of colonial buildings: At Mitla, for eample, a former important city in the Zapotec civilization, a colional church was built over a former Zapotec structure, using some of the stone from said structure in it's construction. Today, there are still some surviving pre-hispanic, Zapotec walls around the church.
Similarly, in Mexico city, there are still some buildings where there's visible, Aztec stone blocks and sculptures in them, from where they were re-used in colonial buildings. In some cases, this was even done inadvertently: At Cholula, a major Mesoamerican city, a church was build over a large, nearby hill. The Spanish didn't realize that this hill was actually a buried pyramid, in fact the largest monument in the world by mass and volume, which had been abandoned in the preceding centuries and forgotten. Today, the church is itself considered historic, and prevents the full exccavation of the pyramid below and the ruins around it.
The only concrete examples I know of that could loosely be considered colonists taking advantage of native "infrastructure" are the peculiar cases of colonists co-opting centuries-old native burial mounds as sacred spaces for white people.
There are numerous examples of churches and cemeteries built on top of or around Hopewellian mounds:
I wish I could offer more information around this rather interesting phenomenon, but to my knowledge there has been very little written about it.
