The Principle of Non-Ownership — The Earth Owns Itself
The radical Indigenous teaching that land cannot be owned — only related to, cared for, and responsible for — represents not a failure of property law but a more profound understanding of the human relationship to earth.
When Tecumseh of the Shawnee spoke to Governor William Henry Harrison in 1810, he said: 'The way, the only way to stop this evil, is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to all, for the use of each.' This was not a naive claim of primitive communism but a sophisticated philosophical position: that the earth is a living being with her own integrity, and that the idea of owning her is as absurd as owning one's mother. The legal framework of 'property' applied to land is a recent and peculiar invention — it dates from the enclosure of the English commons in the 14th-17th centuries — that has produced ecological catastrophe precisely because it severs the relationship between those who 'own' land and those who must live with the consequences of their management.
No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers... Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth?
Legal philosopher Carol Rose in Property and Persuasion documents that Indigenous communal land tenure systems consistently maintained ecological integrity over millennia, while fee-simple private property regimes systematically externalized environmental costs — confirming that land ownership as currently structured is ecologically incompatible with long-term sustainability.
Tecumseh's speech, 1810
Written about in
- What Native American wisdom says about land and belonging
Tecumseh argued to Governor Harrison in 1810 that no nation could sell land, because the land had never been divided in the first place. Belonging, on that view, is a shared use, not a title deed.