The English longbows were so superior to the native American bows that the early colonists were worried that English bows would fall into the hands of the natives and be copied by them. When the Jamestown colonists heard that the Virginia Company was sending them a shipment of bows, they became so alarmed that they sent a ship out to interdict the shipment. The bows were offloaded in Bermuda and never made it to the New World.
No worries about guns, steel swords, etc., being captured, because the native technology would have been incapable of copying them. Besides, where were the natives going to get gunpowder? But English longbows fell into the niche of being low enough tech to be copied, but much higher tech than what the natives had.
That doesn't sound very accurate to me at all.
Technologically, there was nothing particularly special about English longbows. They were just exceptionally long, thick, strong, well-made D or round cross section self bows. Nothing complex or fancy in their construction, just a really strong piece of wood, a really strong string, and a lot of craftsmanship.
They also tended to require training from a very young age in order to build up the muscle strength necessary to pull them, and perform the correct motions (the reconstructed draw of an English longbow is actually fairly complex and demanding, much like how competitive weightlifting is a lot more complex than grab-and-heave). The training was intensive enough that yeoman remains from the time that longbows were used, all have very specific, distinctive skeletal deformities. Most of them would have been crippled by arthritis by age 40, if they lived that long.
I'm pretty sure the eastern woodland tribes could have easily made comparable bows, if they'd had any inclination to. But they didn't, because they had no need to fire incredibly heavy, thick arrows that were intended to have some chance of piercing iron and steel armor.
The early colonists were morons if they were actually worried about Native Americans copying 150 pound bows and 3 ounce arrows, and spending
years learning how to properly draw them and exercising to build up enough strength.