A while back, I talked about the story of Cain and Abel and the metaphor of early farmers who came into conflict with hunter-gathers and herding societies – Cain of course representing the former and Abel being the latter. While Cain has traditionally seen by the three Abrahamic faiths as being the "bad guy," I suggested that in the broader context, the story wasn't really about "good" and "evil" – just the often tragic consequences of what happens when a newer way of life overtakes another.

Now that we’ve all enjoyed our Thanksgiving meals, it's worthwhile to consider how the Cain and Abel story played out in North American history.

Agriculture was not unknown to American Indians (by the way, this is what most of them prefer to be called as opposed to "Native American" – an acknowledgement of the fact that their ancestors were also immigrants to this continent, starting between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago). Most were hunter-gatherers. Those living on the Great Plains, Great Basin or the Inland Pacific Northwest didn't really have that much of a choice; without massive clearing of the land, irrigation and tools to dig, it's pretty hard to cultivate food plants in these areas. Others, such as the Salish and Chinookan-speaking peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, lived among such abundance, they didn't have to work very hard to get food – giving them the leisure time to develop some of the continent's most sophisticated native art (that's where you find elaborate totem poles and wood carvings). The Dineh (Navajo) of the Four Corners region eventually turned to herding, rather like Abel.

There were however a number of Indian tribes that did practice agriculture. The Mandan of present-day North Dakota were one of these; another were the mysterious Anasazi, who had a rather sophisticated urbanized society and a political empire that once covered a good chunk of southern Utah and Colorado as well as Arizona and New Mexico.

When the "Pilgrims" established their colony in 1620, they encountered Indians who cultivated maize (or what we call "corn" – which used to be a generic word for all cereal grains). These were the Wampanoeg, one of the Algonquin-speaking tribes who lived in most of New England. Interestingly, the Wampanoeg celebrated fall harvest festivals every year, much like Europeans. The story of how Tsiquantum (Squanto) taught these early colonists about growing maize is well-known. The European colonists weren’t new to agriculture, of course, but they were new to the New World and they had not yet learned the weather patterns, soil characteristics, and local conditions that are critical for successful farming (particularly in the days before mechanization and artificial fertilizers).

Many of the sentimental views of American Indian tribes held by today’s non-Indians lack any basis in fact. The Indians didn’t live in perfect harmony with nature, they made war on one another just as most people across the world have always done, and so forth; they were and are regular people with all the foibles and follies of our species. There is one idealistic view that does have some basis in fact, however, which is that the American Indians had a sustainable model of agricultural development and mixed-use food production. It has been out for a few years, but “Enduring Seeds,” an excellent book by a top botanist discusses how the Indians preserved an enormously rich gene pool of plants and animals as part of their food production system, and how important it is for us to maintain and extend that gene pool rather than seeking ever higher yields from monoculture.

In 1620, European settlers began to learn the intricacies of New World food production from people who had been developing their skills for thousands of years. Almost four hundred years later, we may finally be learning another important lesson about preserving the genetic diversity of our food supply.