“No One Owns the Earth: Indigenous Voices Challenge the Myth of Land Ownership”

What is this thing we call property?

Massasoit, the great sachem of the Wampanoag, once posed this question to early English settlers, incredulous at the notion of owning land. “It cannot be the earth,” he said. “The land is our mother, nourishing all her children… How can one man say it belongs only to him?”

Massasoit’s words remain not just poignant—they are prophetic. They echo across continents and centuries in the philosophies of Indigenous peoples whose lifeways have been shaped not by ownership but by relationship: to land, to community, to life itself.

These voices—often marginalized in legal codes and colonial histories—offer a profound challenge to one of the central assumptions of modern civilization: that land can be bought, sold, enclosed, and commodified like any other good.

From the red sands of Australia to the tundra of Scandinavia, the message is clear: the Earth is not property—it is kin.

In Aboriginal Australia, Elder Bob Randall of the Anangu people once said, “We don’t own the land. The land owns us.” In this worldview, the land is not a resource to be exploited but a living entity that gives and sustains life—a source of law, spirit, and identity.

The Māori of Aotearoa (New Zealand) express this through the phrase *Ko au te whenua, ko te whenua ko au*—“I am the land, and the land is me.” Here, land is not an object, but an ancestor. It cannot be possessed because it is part of who we are.

In southern Africa, the San people—one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth—have no word for land ownership. Their traditional belief: “The earth and I are of one mind.” To claim the land as one’s own would be like trying to own the sky.

The Ainu of Japan speak of *kamuy*—spiritual beings who reside in all things, from rivers to mountains. These spirits cannot be owned. Like the land itself, they must be treated with humility and respect.

Even in the harsh Arctic of Sápmi, the Sami people, known for reindeer herding across open landscapes, remind us: “No one can own the wind or the land.”

And in the Andes, where the Quechua and Aymara peoples revere Pachamama, the Earth is a living goddess. She does not belong to us. We belong to her.

Contrast this with the dominant legal and economic model inherited from European colonialism: a system in which land is a title, a deed, a commodity, a financial asset. The enclosure of commons, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the commodification of soil and sea—all of these stem from a belief that land is an *it*, not a *thou*.

But what has this belief brought us? Environmental collapse. Spiraling inequality. A spiritual estrangement from the ground beneath our feet.

The Indigenous critique is not nostalgia. It is a lifeline.

It offers an alternative foundation for how we might live—one based not on dominion, but on interdependence. Not on extraction, but on reciprocity. Not on ownership, but on belonging.

So how do we reconcile the wisdom of these traditions with the complexities of a modern world? One answer lies in the philosophy of Henry George, a 19th-century political economist who asked a simple but radical question: *If the land belongs to all, why do a few profit merely from holding it?*

George proposed that while individuals should own the products of their labor, the value of land—created by nature and the community—should be shared by all. He called for a system where land value is collected through public rent and returned to the people through common benefits, not hoarded as private windfall.

This idea doesn’t return us to a premodern past—it points forward to a more just and sustainable future. A future where we acknowledge that no one made the Earth, and therefore no one has the moral right to monopolize it.

Perhaps the first step toward repairing our relationship with the Earth is not technological, but philosophical. To listen—to really listen—to the Indigenous voices who never forgot what most of us have: that we are part of the Earth, not apart from it.

And then, to build systems that reflect that truth.