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> The indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything like our modern concept of land "ownership"

I doubt they had deeds to land. But they did fight inter-tribal wars over which territory belonged to which tribe.

Humans have a very well developed notion of "mine" and "not mine". Saying indigenous peoples did not have this is an extraordinary claim, and would need strong evidence.

Thanks for this bit of sanity. Arguing that Native Americans didn't have a concept of land ownership, while still having the concept "I'm going to murder you and your compatriots so that I can occupy the land where you live.", seems a bit like splitting hairs.
It’s not splitting hairs. There’s a recognizable difference between a tribe collectively defending exclusive access to certain land, and the concept of transferable, heritable private land interest.
Yes and no.

Even in the US, commons-deeded land between multiple people is still a thing. Albeit one that lawyers hate to mess with because it's more work for them.

For purposes of this thread, exclusive control of an area, absent other claims, would certainly entitle indigenous American peoples to ownership of that land.

We even form corporations to try to deed land as a group. That's the entire purpose of an HOA -- to confer private ownership of community-owned land and equipment among the members of the community as their private land changes hands.
HOAs do not confer private ownership of land among members of a group.

They impose a mutually agreed upon set of rules on everyone who owns land that is covered by the HOA (with one of the rules preventing severance of the property from the HOA).

I'm pretty sure all of the common areas in HOAs that I used to live in were equally owned by all members.
I don’t think thats how my HOA works. I live in a high rise; I believe the HOA owns the common areas but grants exclusive use of certain parts to owners/tenants.
You don’t need a corporation to deed land to a group. Any group of persons can hold title to a property. My wife and I had to choose whether to buy our condo as joint tenants or as tenants in common.
Fine, but recall what started this discussion, this issue of land acknowledgements (which I agree are absolute peak stupidity which literally managed to piss off everyone on all sides - the right thought it was useless virtue signalling, and lots of actual indigenous people pretty much agreed, considering it a vacuous gesture). For all intents and purposes, native tribes owned that land before settlers kicked them off and said you couldn't live there anymore.
> transferable, heritable private

None of this is guaranteed by 'ownership'.

> seems a bit like splitting hairs.

It isn't splitting hairs. It's outright propaganda invented to justify stealing native land. The idea being if natives had no sense of property, we didn't really steal anything from them because they had no property to begin with.

The other trope justifying theft of the land is of the "dumb indians" who sold the land for cheap. Like indians selling manhattan for a handful of beads.

I don't think that's accurate. The historic colonizers fully understood that native Americans had a sense of property, which is why even the most blatant land grabs were almost always justified by a forced sale or treaty. I've only ever heard the idea that natives didn't own land from people promoting the myth of the noble savage.
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Brett Devereaux talks about this in relation to the Mongols and other nomads. Yes they didn’t “own” land but if you trespassed on their grazing pastures they would absolutely use violence against you: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...

The notion of a lack of land ownership is just fetishization.

Also, OUR idea of ownership, at least legally, is based on the idea of usage and access. You may own a piece of land, but not the mineral rights. You can't prevent an aircraft from flying over your property etc. Ownership is a bundle of rights and exclusions. The idea of ownership meaning "who is allowed to hunt on this land" would fit right into our legal framework of ownership.
I'm also pretty sure that any tribe that built a village and farmed had a very strong notion of my house and my garden.

Even animals mark their territory and aggressively defend it.

You'd be surprised then. Indigenous property rights aren't homogenous. Many lacked the kind of exclusive ownership that we have in Western systems. (Some) Inuit recognized communal band lands for example, where a particular individual within that band might have rights to a particular resource location while they used it, but their usage was governed by complex systems of traditions and they couldn't necessarily exclude others from separate resources in the same physical location.

Pueblo groups had extremely strong ideas about property lines, but those properties were often analogous to modern corporations where individual families could own "shares" in the property, and exchange those for other shares in other properties to reallocate ownership. Areas within a property could also be "rented" to others, or the entire property reclaimed by the government.

The best way I can summarize it is that native Americans tended to have much more fine-grained ideas about what property rights entail than our Western systems. Capabilities based security vs role based security, to really force the analogy into computing.

Is that really different than traditional Western societies? Medieval European societies had complex systems governing shared rights and ownership of common grazing lands and forests, for example. Those rights changed over time (such as through the Inclosure Acts) but it's not a concept alien to western societies.
There's probably an interesting comparative discussion that I'm not remotely qualified to have on medieval European property rights, but there's enough history of colonial settlers wildly misunderstanding indigenous property systems that I don't know a better word than "alien".
"Misunderstanding" seems perhaps overly charitable to the colonial settlers.

Possessing of enough military force to ignore others rights would be more historically descriptive.

Even if they had fully understood all the nuances of indigenous property rights, they still would have stolen the land. Confusion was just a fig leaf.

Developing defence capacity is a basic responsibility. Humans can scream foul if they lose out to machine hybrids or extraterrestrials.
So what, it’s your own fault if someone assaults you and takes away your things?
I mean, kind of?

Not in a morally absolving the attacker way.

But in a you had agency and chose to underinvest in defense way.

That said, it's pretty unlikely the rest of the world could have defended against a technologically advanced Europe / Middle East / China, at their respective peaks, and especially after transoceanic sail enabled cross-sea logistics.

> The best way I can summarize it is that native Americans tended to have much more fine-grained ideas about what property rights entail than our Western systems.

Capitalism has very fine-grained ideas about property rights. Consider corporations, for just one example. There are multiple kinds of shares about who owns what rights to the corporation. Then there are all the contractual obligations that, in essence, transfer specific property rights. There are the web of rights that workers have over it. Then there are the rights the government has over it, via tax obligations and regulations. Layer on the concept of "stakeholders" that layer on more ownership rights.

We need one title one owner. Shared ownership is confusion. Governmens shouldn't run interference between managers and stockholders.
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