There Is No Just Theory of Land Ownership

Introduction

I know, the title is clickbaity, and it makes a stronger claim than I actually wish to make. So, go into this realizing that I realize that I may be wrong, or that there might be competing accounts that are ethically grounded, or that I haven't considered all of the salient facts here. Also, for the purposes of this article, I'm going to bounce around to various ethnonyms. There are arguments for and against nearly every term to refer to the people who were in the land that would become the United States - both inside and outside the cultures that these terms refer to - that trying to find and use one that everyone will agree with is a fool's errand. Nevertheless, we need an understood umbrella term, and I shall choose the one that fits my whims at the moment. With that out of the way...

Oh, the Unitarians. So often at the vanguard of progressive expressions of governance and policy. Oh, the progressive wing of the Democratic party! So often eager to embrace positions intended (in good faith!) to counter the positions of an increasingly-unhinged, flailing, cruel wing of the GOP. And yet... I find myself at disagreement with some of these progressive positions, because I think they've been ill-considered.

This requires, I suppose, some bit of explanation. At the house of worship that I attend in Saint Paul, our minister led a call-and-response with a bit of a tricky "gotcha" at the end. "Whose streets?" was the call, "Our streets!" was the reply. Replace "streets" with "neighbors" and "streets", etc. This activity, it should be noted, comes in the wake of some of the most truly terrifying authoritarian bullshit ever perpetrated against the country by its own government.

And so we, the congregation, dutifully played along, until the last of the "Whose __ ?" and the word was "land". "Our land!" we all replied, but of course we had all walked into his trap. "Not our land!", he gently chided us, before reminding us that it was "native land". "The land", as you will be reminded by organizers at many municipal, corporate, and private events where the leadership generally espouses liberal viewpoints, does not belong to "us". Depending on the exact phrasing the event has chosen to embrace, you'll be reminded that it "belongs" to the native population that was displaced from it before, or the somewhat weaker claim, that "we reside on the traditional homelands of (insert tribal names here)." After an appropriate amount of uncomfortable laughter, we moved on. The mood, I admit, was light - the implicit understanding was that we all, of course, being good progressives, had made this mistake in good faith, and I suppose that's broadly correct. I think most of the sorts of people I'd like to hang out with, and myself included, believe that the Trail of Tears constituted a moral atrocity.

I, however, (audibly and involuntarily) sucked on my teeth at his statement. "Native land" as both a phrase and a concept deeply bothers me, as I've written about this before. In that case, the context was that of land acknowledgements, and there I wrote:

Acknowledgements can ask the listeners or readers to consider a powerful question: whose land are we on?

It is not always easy to answer that. From the late 1600s to the 1850s, two principal tribes vied for control of the lands encompassing present-day Minnesota: The Dakota (Sioux), had long occupied Minnesota when the Ojibwe (Chippewa), a branch of the eastern Algonquian people, began moving into the area from the east. This intrusion led to periodic but bloody inter-tribal warfare which resulted in the eventual migration of the Dakota from the forested part of Minnesota to the open prairies and river valleys of the south and west. The Ojibwe in turn occupied the east central and northern forests.

Many if not most acknowledgments take the form of a statement recognizing that the speaker is standing on the “traditional” lands of another. This phrasing raises fundamental difficulties of basic meaning. What does “traditional” mean in this case? Does it simply mean “not legal”? Does it mean “sort of, but not really”? Whose tradition are we referring to? It seems possible that the Dakota Sioux and Ojibwe peoples might have differing accounts of who the land “belongs” to, depending on whom you ask and in what context. Offering a factually accurate acknowledgement becomes difficult when there are competing traditional and legal claims. The non-fixed nature of who resides on or who, in some sense, “has a claim to” the land must be taken into account when crafting an authentic and healing acknowledgement. History is complicated, and implicit in the question of “who the land belongs to” is the dubious assumption that it “belongs” to one specific group or another in a moral sense. In crafting an acknowledgement, one runs the danger of attaching a mythologized, reductive “Native identity” to the land, or perpetuating the stereotypical myth of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature.

And here I want to expand and expound upon this idea. I think when people say things like "We reside on the lands of such and such a tribe." they are implicitly embracing the idea that the lands in question belong to those tribes, or to the original descendants of the people who were forced off of them, in some sort of moral sense. In other words, I believe that people are espousing a view that we are not the rightful owners of the land, and that someone else is the rightful owner, and that we (meaning the entirety of everyone else) are illegitimate occupiers or trespassers. Sometimes this rises to a more or less urgent legal claim, but people espousing this tend to be in the minority. Lots of groups likely have nuanced and considered positions on this topic, but I think my belief captures the overall spirit of what people mean when they use the phrase "native lands"; that, to put it somewhat crudely, anyone descended from colonists of any sort are illegitimate occupiers of the lands of the United States.

Conversely, I, personally, think the concept of land ownership in the metaphysical sense gives rise to irreconcilable moral failings. Further, the idea of "native" when applied to an identity linked to the land is a slippery one that denies standing to other people with rightful moral claims.

Defining terms

First, like so many philosophical arguments, it's important to define terms. What does “ownership” entail, and how does it arise? When we use the term, we generally mean in two ways: moral or metaphysical, and legal.

The legal meaning is generally the more straightforward of the two. If I can produce evidence (papers, records, perhaps even widely-understood oral or shared history) showing that the appropriate legal requirements are satisfied, then I can rightfully claim that I, in a legal sense, exercise ownership over such and such an object, such as my house or my car. But the entirety of our conception of just land ownership cannot rest on the mere legal conception of ownership. Documents might not reflect laws that are just, or the documents transferring or claiming ownership might have been made under conditions of duress or coercion. These are practical historical and modern concerns: some of the transfers made by Americans from the Indians who occupied this land many centuries ago were made under nominally lawful but unjust conditions. Some were illegal at the time, tolerated for purely racist reasons, and given ex post facto legal legitimacy.

Ownership, at a metaphysical level, has competing theories of how it arises. Regardless of which theory one uses to arrive at the status, there are generally a few common constitutive elements. The first is a collective recognition of ownership. Like citizenship or marriage, we can imagine ownership as a status bestowed by a sufficiently large and normatively authoritative group. If enough people (and perhaps the state) agree that I own this car, then I have a claim that is likely to convince almost everyone of the truth of my ownership. This cuts both ways, however, as this account allows ownership to be dissolved if the authoritative group declines to, or chooses to stop recognizing the ownership. This implies that ownership is inherently social. In other words, the concept has no meaning in an absence of other potential claimants. If I am the only person in the universe, then claims of mine or not mine collapse into meaninglessness.

Secondly, ownership does not require money changing hands or legal recognition per se. Gifts, inheritance, conquest, or sheer continued uncontested control have all been treated historically as sources of ownership. Monetary exchange is not metaphysically constitutive; it is evidentiary or procedural. Nor does a legal claim - as we examined before - automatically confer rightful ownership in a moral or metaphysical sense.

Thirdly, ownership implies some rightful claim of exclusion. If I own a car, then I can rightfully say that nobody else is allowed to use it. Even if I am the victim of a carjacking and someone removes me from my car by force and takes it for themselves, my rightful claim over the car does not cease. This does not imply enforceability. Even if the carjacker escapes, a theory of ownership would recognize my continuing right. By the same token, we might say that ownership implies possessability, which might be latent or actual, but ownership as a concept ceases to make sense in a world in which enforcement of possession is conceptually impossible. In other words, claims of ownership are not free-floating: they exist embedded in some theory of justification shared among the individuals that constitute the society. Therefore, ownership is constituted in, at the very least, collective recognition of the condition of ownership over some thing, and in a right of exclusion, that is, if I own some thing, I am rightfully free to say that nobody else can use it.

Legal ownership is much more narrow and easy to define: a socially constructed bundle of rights (use, exclusion, transfer), always contingent, limited, and able to be revised or reworked. A crucial distinction must be drawn between legal ownership and what I will call metaphysical ownership. As I have said, legal ownership is a socially constructed and institutionally enforced bundle of rights - use, transfer, and exclusion - granted and limited by a political system. It is contingent, revisable, and often constrained for the sake of others.

Metaphysical ownership, by contrast, is a claim of ultimate moral dominion: the idea that a person or group is rightfully entitled to control a piece of land and exclude others from it in a fundamental sense, independent of current social arrangements. My argument is directed primarily at this second notion. While legal systems of property may be more or less just depending on their structure and application, the idea that land itself can be the object of absolute moral ownership gives rise, I believe, to deep and persistent ethical problems. My argument is not primarily against legal property regimes as such, but against the idea that land can be the object of metaphysical ownership - i.e., that any group can have ultimate, enduring, morally privileged dominion over it.

The Moral Failures of Metaphysical Ownership

Naturally Creates Undemocratic Limitations on Access to a Basic Good

How ownership arises is its own (quite broad) topic that is beyond the scope of this article. I wish to examine the contours of the legal and ethical issues raised by the concept as applied to land. Ownership is a somewhat tricky concept to apply to land, for two reasons: One, because ownership creates an undemocratic exclusionary paradigm around access to a basic human good. Two, as a framework for evaluating historical injustices, it fails to take time into account.

To the first point: ownership of land creates undemocratic limitations on access to a basic good. What do we mean by this? The problem is not that individuals who live on land (and may or may not own it, in a legal sense) are thereby harmed by ownership; instead, the problem is structural. Land is finite, immovable, and necessary for human life. Any system that treats land as an object of exclusive ownership - where some may rightfully exclude others - necessarily produces a class of people whose access to land is contingent on the permission of others. This is not an incidental feature of such a system, but a constitutive one. Even where many occupants are also owners, the system as a whole creates asymmetric power relationships between owners and non-owners, and permits decisions about land use that impose unavoidable external costs on others. Because land is the shared ecological and spatial base of human life, a framework grounded primarily in exclusionary ownership will inevitably come into tension with the basic interests of those who must also live on and be affected by that land. How do these tensions come into being? In three ways: firstly, it is the immovable physical medium that people must live on, second, it forms part of a state's area, and thirdly, it is necessarily a contiguous part of the ecosystem.

Firstly, land is the place on which we all live, whether we like it or not, there is no other practical choice for large groups of people. (That one guy who lives on the Principality of Sealand notwithstanding.) Since we all have to live on the land, we all have a stake in how it is administered, and if we all have a say in its administration, then it follows that no single person (or group of people) can claim the right to exclude all others entirely. This does not imply an infinite moral claim to every last square meter of the globe; we may say that the relevant "boundary of concern" can be set where decisions about land materially affect the well-being of occupying nearby individuals or communities. Beyond that, moral claims become less direct, though ecological and social interconnections can extend that boundary in complex ways.

How the land is used and administered affects the lives, health, and well-being of those who are currently living there. Bound up in this is the non-triviality of "simply moving". Individuals, families, and groups acquire material goods that take up space, must be stored, and that have economic and social value that might be economically or practically difficult or even impossible to move over large distances. They may have deep and interconnected social relationships that are spatially bounded, and these relationships may imply deep emotional bonds of caring and reciprocity, material sharing, or other forms of caretaking that a person or group may lack if they lived in another area. Land is immovable, at least in aggregate. Humans can, obviously, shape large parts of the land, cut holes through entire mountains, or - to put it crudely - move dirt from one place to another place. But we cannot (without impractical effort) physically separate from the earth large areas of land and move them somewhere else. I could not physically pick up an entire prairie or forest and give it to you - at least not without destroying it during the transfer.

Secondly, land forms part of a state's area, and the state has a legitimate interest in the well-being of the people who are living within its borders and on the land currently under consideration. (For the purposes of my argument, I will differentiate between individuals residing on an arbitrary piece of land and the administration or stewardship of that land by a governmental entity.) If a given individual or group can assert a right of exclusion over a tract of land, then a state's administrative bodies may find themselves legally barred from performing critical ecological, social, or administrative functions, such as monitoring ecological conditions, apprehension of criminals, or performing census activities. Exclusive claims of ownership that prevent the state from administering or regulating the land would threaten the health, safety, and social cohesion of communities.

Third, it necessarily forms part of the larger ecosystem, and this is impossible to separate piecemeal from the land writ large. Anything one can do to the land will necessarily alter its ecosystem, and a just government would regulate this for the benefit of all citizens that it would affect. Humanity broadly understands that air and water pollution can spread far beyond the point of origin, and other uses of land may have effects far beyond the borders of legal ownership¹. Neighbors may have legitimate claims on the nature of land use. If I build a coal-fired power plant on land that I own, that has health implications for people residing near me, even if they do not directly own the land that I built the power plant atop of. A pithy internet comment reads "Your freedom ends where my lungs begin."; there is deep truth to this. Absolute ownership conflicts with the principle that an administrative state may rightly regulate the use and activity of land for the benefit of those living around and on it. Land does not exist in some state of individual isolation - its use impacts others and the common environment, and the moral legitimacy of property claims must be balanced against these unavoidable externalities.

On my account, then, "ownership" attempts to apply an inherently exclusionary framework onto a good that is properly understood as the common wealth of all those residing in a state. (Reasonable people might disagree that states are the proper sociopolitical instrument by which to administer land, but I shall go with that assumption here. While at first it might appear that this answer merely moves the problem back a step, in fact it asks a different set of questions which are beyond the scope of what I'm attempting to answer here.) When someone says “this is native land,” they are implicitly framing land in the same way we frame a car or a house: someone has the rightful claim, and anyone else is morally secondary or even a trespasser. On what basis do we assign this exclusive moral claim to a group whose descendants may or may not have any practical involvement with the land today, especially given centuries of conflict, migration, and displacement?

To be clear, I am not saying that property law is unjust, or undemocratic, or undesirable, though practical examples will be more or less just depending on which people implement them. Rather, my point is that land can be justly administered, rights may be assigned, regulated, reworked or repealed, but no one has a final and unquestionable claim for all time, and this principle applies equally to modern states, private owners, and indigenous groups. Land is a shared precondition of human life, and thus cannot be fully enclosed by any moral claim of exclusion vis-à-vis ownership.

Ignoring new moral claimants

There is a second way attaching ownership to the land fails on moral grounds: it ignores time. What do I mean by this?

Arguments for how or by what right do these lands continue to belong to the American Indians generally fall into one of two categories. We shall consider both in turn.

In the first formulation, the historical justice is held in almost spiritual terms. As best I can discern, the argument goes something like this: "The American Indians occupied these lands for centuries, living in harmony with nature, forming bonds of deep understanding of and interdependence on the natural order of the world, and no compensatory act could ever be sufficient to satisfy the requirements of justice." In this formulation, great weight is given to their "native" status, conferring on them special status because, the argument goes, they were fortunate enough to be here first, and this metaphysical right cannot be dissolved.

This argument asks us to consider the American Indians under a special moral category: "native". This status is permanent and ongoing, conferred by being a descendant of the original people who lived here before European settlers arrived. For this argument to work, two things must be true:

"Native" must be a category with robust inclusion criteria, and "native" as a category must have a reasonable theory of why it comes with a special moral status with rights over the land that no other groups enjoy. "Native" as a category is not as clear-cut as those making the argument might hope. How do you define "native American"? Suppose we went the easy way, and restricted the category to those individuals enrolled in a federally-recognized tribe. This would certainly satisfy some people. But what about unrecognized tribes? This is not an idle question: the list of unrecognized tribes claiming a native status is not short². Surely, if they are truly "native Americans", it would be wrong to deny their stake in ownership of the land. What about the children of intermarriage between white settlers and Indians? What about intermarriage between tribes - over what stretches of land could such a child claim moral ownership? What about generations downstream from intermarriage? Should we resurrect "single drop" laws in defense of native peoples retaining control over vast tracts of land? Tribes themselves argue and have disputes over membership and enrollment, with disenrollment being a sensitive and painful contemporary topic among those affected. How should we consider individuals disenrolled from a tribe, recognized or not? Do their claims cease when their enrollment does?

Further, as is often pointed out, and as I gestured to at the beginning of this article, the Indians are not a monolithic culture or government, nor did all of the people from all of the hundreds of societies that existed at the time that European settlers began arriving themselves arrive at the same time. There were four major migrations separated by vast stretches of time³, with different peoples and cultures arriving separately across the Bering Land Bridge. Do we pick the descendants of one of these migrations, and confer the status of native on them only, or are all of them eligible for that category? If picking just one, why are other groups excluded? If allowing all of them, why did later migrations by Europeans who then had children not confer upon them the status of "native"? Ultimately, I believe that "native" as a category fails to have acceptable standards by which inclusion or exclusion in the category are judged, and is therefore a poor standard on which to base an important moral, political, or legal status. This does not mean endorsing a view that "might makes right", but it does mean that perhaps claims of "native or not" are insufficient to resolve claims of moral ownership of land. The concept of “native” may describe historical and cultural relationships to land, but it cannot by itself ground permanent moral ownership of territory.

The second argument is more nuanced. In this second formulation, the historical injustice is held to be ongoing for more technical or law-based reasons, as the unjust conditions under which the original crimes happened have not been rectified in any satisfactory way. The argument goes something like this: "The Indians occupied these lands at the time that European settlers began arriving, and were, overall, forced, tricked, or manipulated into handing over their land to the settlers. This process was unjust and in many instances illegal, therefore we the descendants of those who perpetrated these crimes (be they moral, legal, or both) remain illegitimate occupiers and trespassers on this land, for as long as we remain here, and these crimes represent an indelible stain on our collective conscience that we cannot under any circumstances be absolved of."

This argument is grounded on solid historical footing. It is an unavoidable historical fact that acquisition of land⁴ was made under conditions of duress, deception, and sometimes shocking acts of unspeakable violence, and whatever trades or purchases that may have formally been on paper were utterly bankrupt from the standpoint of justice. It is also true that in the centuries since, no real attempt has been made by the United States government to rectify this wrongdoing in any serious way, and in fact, many of the actions taken made it much, much worse.

While the suffering of the Native peoples involved is an indisputable historical fact and a moral atrocity, we cannot base a modern claim of moral ownership of land on history or descent alone. To do so ignores time in a crucial way: the introduction of new people with a moral claim. Every new generation creates new moral claimants - people who were not present at the historical moment of displacement, but who now live, work, and build communities on the land. To ignore them is to assert a static moral universe where only ancestry matters. This is not to assert that time erases wrongs. But I do assert that to assert an exclusive claim of moral ownership over land that has been built up on, become areas of community and homes for subsequent generations who now work and live in these areas is to ignore the moral worth of those people. Surely no one alive today was involved in the theft of land from anyone else in the context in which we speak; their claims are not worthless or subservient to claims of justice denied. How do we weigh the claims of those living now against the moral weight of harms committed centuries ago?

Every new generation that resides on the land has legitimate moral interests tied to that location: children, spouses, parents, grandparents, communities established, cultural and labor and social bonds, housing and commerce that materially enriches people's lives are all contributed by the people living in a particular area. Time complicates historical justice because the universe of moral claimants is constantly expanding. Just as it is difficult to draw clear inclusion criteria for 'native' status, it is equally difficult to draw boundaries around historical claims when time has added countless new stakeholders to the moral landscape - and long since erased the original claimants.

This answer may be seen as unsatisfying, and as an endorsement of a maxim that reads something like "Time nullifies moral wrongs". I do not assert that. But it does complicate the administration of justice, and in some cases, may make it practically impossible in the sense of complete restoration of the land to (the ancestors of) the dispossessed. However, I believe most of those who assert that we are on "native land" do so with good intentions and rarely believe that the correct stance is to advocate for wholesale and unequivocal return of the land to the Native Americans. This would be a practical impossibility, and would itself create new injustices against the people now living there who did not participate in the original injustice. More importantly for my argument, however, is the rejection of the idea that one group is privileged over any other to occupy these lands.

Stewardship, or, if not ownership, then what?

If not ownership, then how should we manage the air, water, and land that all of us depend on? I consider a framework worth pursuing as having distinct qualities:

1. It must encode into both law and social understandings the fact that the land is a common resource for all humanity.
2. This creates certain obligations which we must all abide by.
3. Governance. It must set limits, create remedies, and have a mechanism by which future claimants are recognized as having moral worth. Affected people (where we set the "boundary of concern", wherever that may lie) must be given a legally-protected seat at the table of decision-making.

Luckily for my purposes, there exists just such a framework; that of stewardship or public trust doctrine. The trust model is an obvious one here, and the legal priors are quite rich, going back to Roman law and English common law, and foundational US cases like Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois. A trustee has beneficiaries, duties, and someone who can sue. Without that, stewardship is moot. As currently practiced, this is more a promising foothold than a firmly-established doctrine in the United States. It bears mentioning that a person or persons with the legal obligation to speak for future generations and claimants would need to exist. This has priors in Hungarian and Welsh law, which I find very interesting.

As for duties and responsibilities, here things may get truly into the nitty-gritty that I wish to avoid, because the topic is vast, beyond the scope of this essay, and I risk saying both too much and too little. Here I will point to the work of Dr. Edith Brown Weiss. In her book, In Fairness to Future Generations, she frames each generation as both trustee and beneficiary of the planet. Her framework rests on three principles, roughly: conserving options (don't narrow the range of choices future humans have), conserving quality, and conserving access to the planet and its natural legacy. More can be said, but I find this position compelling.

Finally, governance, which must be community-oriented. The work of Dr. Elinor Ostrom speaks forcefully here. In Governing the Commons, she shows how communities can govern shared resources without either private ownership or top-down state control. Her vision of shared resource control includes principles important to successful governance, including clearly-defined boundaries and membership, rules matched to local conditions, affected people taking part in making the rules, monitoring by the users themselves, graduated sanctions, cheap ways to resolve disputes, and nested layers of governance for larger systems.

I am not attempting to write the statute here; instead, I want to gesture broadly toward the sort of alternative to land ownership that I think is worth consideration: I mean something like a trust relationship, with duties running to future generations and affected communities taking part in decisions.

Objections

I anticipate some objections to my position, and I will attempt to answer them here.

Indigenous nations had legitimate territorial governance that was destroyed.

This is true, but injustice does not create an eternal debt. Time introduces new moral claimants, so reconciliation must balance present populations with descendants of the dispossessed. Justice must consider both historical wrongs and the legitimate interests of present populations. Over time, new communities form deep moral attachments to the land - families, institutions, and social structures - and those communities and the individuals that comprise them deserve ethical consideration. Rectification must therefore balance the claims of the dispossessed with the claims of current inhabitants. Time does not necessarily weaken claims of injustice, but it does create conflicting legitimate claims that we must contend with.

Your theory risks implying “might makes right”. If conquest eventually becomes legitimate simply through time and settlement, then might effectively become right.

My argument does not justify conquest. It acknowledges that historical injustices can produce situations that cannot be fully reversed without causing new injustices, without justifying the original injustice. The goal of justice in such circumstances is not perfect restoration, because this is oftentimes impossible without significant harm to new moral claimants. I argue for something more difficult than simply turning back the clock: the construction of fair and equitable political arrangements among those who now share the land.

Why does the current state get to administer the land?

We come now to perhaps the hardest question to answer. There may, in fact, not be a satisfactory answer. My own view is that no political authority can claim perfectly legitimate territorial rights; states exercise authority over land as a contingent historical fact that must be justified continuously through just governance. The legitimacy of the currently-administering state comes from it serving the needs and interests of the current population, not from the justice of historical conquest. Only through ongoing commitment to justice and the well-being of the people residing under it can any government or political entity claim legitimacy.

The United States has treaties with extant Indian nations that it is simply not honoring. What should be done about that?

This gets into scope that is beyond what I'm trying to say about the ownership of land, but the arguments around treaties also carry a moral dimension vis-à-vis the justness of treaties-as-law. (In other words, treaties, like other transfers, can be made under duress, so they can be more or less just depending on how they were made.) Extant tribes hold treaties, and rights derived from those treaties, that remain binding law. Those obligations ought to be honored. That’s a claim about keeping promises, which I do not dispute. My target is the separate claim that the land is morally theirs by virtue of being native. Where there are new moral claimants to consider, they must be represented fairly. Treaties are simply legal arrangements, and revisable, but only with the consent of the parties they bind. In international law, pacta sunt servanda (“agreements must be kept”), and as I say elsewhere, state legitimacy has to be continuously earned through just governance. Honoring its treaties is one of the plainest tests of that.

It's awfully convenient that your argument aligns with your personal self-interest in maintaining the status quo. This obviously personally benefits you.

Fair enough, but that isn't really a counter to my arguments. My thesis, crudely, is that land - like air - belongs to no man or group of men, and to attach a native identity to it is a misguided and incoherent way to rectify the moral harms that were done.

Harms happened, and justice demands that we address them. But the idea that the reason or framework under which we should address them is that the land belongs to the Indians is deeply flawed and incorrect.

Conclusion

How then, are political liberals and people of good conscience to understand and respond to the historical injustices and the ongoing harms they produce?

Firstly, shift the focus away from the land and toward the righting of contemporary injustices suffered by the Native American communities, injustices that persist downstream of the original dispossession without arguing for a reductive "native identity" for the land itself. The land does not belong to the Native people, but neither does it belong to us: it is the common wealth of humanity, and justice is administered by ensuring the well-being of those currently living here in this place and time. This is not easy: there will be disputes over usage, rights, populations, religious considerations, and deep memory of harms committed that can have long since passed into time. These are not irrelevant. But surely the answer does not lie in dispossessing all modern inhabitants and inflicting another moral harm on those currently living here.

Secondly, give financial assistance to organizations and community groups that are focused on Native Americans and issues that affect their populations. There are a variety of these around the country, and they do things such as help indigenous people live well with HIV and work to prevent further transmission of HIV. Others engage youth in cultural arts, still others assist with tobacco cessation, among countless other activities that benefit the lives of American Indians.

Thirdly, advocate, through letter-writing, donations, volunteering, and other means for legislative policies that will right the wrongs we see visited upon our Indigenous neighbors. Reservations remain quite poor relative to surrounding areas, and there are many, many ways to help address this: education and workforce development, funding for higher education, resource management partnerships and job creation programs, expanding the Indian Health Service (IHS) funding, affordable housing construction, broadband internet expansion, community centers and youth programs, and many, many others.

Fourth and finally, advocate an alternative understanding of the land and our human relationship to it; that of stewardship and public trust, not perpetual ownership claims. Petition your government and share your opinions. Get involved in the formation of more just and equitable land management projects. Advocate for laws that recognize the land as belonging to humankind, not corporations or nations or states, but the people whose lives are directly affected by the physical substrate of their lives.

Understanding justice for Native Americans through the lens of land dispossession and ownership is the wrong context and introduces injustice to other people because it does not account for the "common wealth" nature of land, or for new moral claimants that arise or pass away due to time. Instead of focusing on history (whether ancient or recent), we should put our resources toward material improvements in the lives of those currently living and residing on these lands, and work toward a better understanding of our relationship to the land itself: one of stewardship and caretaking.

<sup>1. Planting trees can decrease the urban heat island effect by up to 12 degrees C at the pedestrian level. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01908-4
2. https://accessgenealogy.com/native/list-of-federally-non-recognized-tribes.htm
3. Ancient Beringians / First Americans, approximate timeframe: ~23,000–16,000 years ago
Na-Dene migration, approximate timeframe: ~9,000–5,000 years ago
Paleo-Eskimo migrations, approximate timeframe: ~5,000–3,000 years ago
Neo-Eskimo / Thule expansion, approximate timeframe: ~1,200–800 years ago
4. This is an attempt at a neutral term. I realize many people use "theft" in this context, and it's not an entirely unearned description, but I think it cuts against the larger point I'm trying to make.</sup>