Can Land Be Owned? The Lakota and the Western Idea of Property

Can land be sold? Can the sky? Before you answer, notice what the question is really asking. To own a thing, you first have to agree that it is a thing — an object, separable, countable, transferable. Sitting Bull never granted that premise. Speaking of white settlers, he said they claimed this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, fenced their neighbors away from her, and defaced her with their buildings and their refuse. Land, in that sentence, is not inventory. It is kin.

What we take land to be changes completely from culture to culture. For some it is a parcel number on a deed. For others it is a living body their ancestors once walked across. The ground is beneath all of us who are alive, and above all of those who are not.

The Mother That Cannot Be Sold

Lakota prayer ends with the phrase Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ — all my relations. It is not said only of people. Land, river, mountain, wolf, eagle all sit inside that web of kinship. For the Lakota, Paha Sápa — the Black Hills — is something closer to a sacred ancestor than a place: a living presence where spirits dwell, where one prays, where one speaks and is heard. You cannot sell your mother. You cannot sell Paha Sápa either.

The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed those hills to the Lakota permanently. Then gold was found in them. The treaty was broken unilaterally and the land was taken.

The most striking part of the story arrived a century later. In 1980, the United States Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the Black Hills had been seized unlawfully, and that just compensation was owed with interest — an original valuation of roughly $17.5 million that a hundred years of accrued interest had swollen past $100 million.

The Lakota refused it. They refused because taking the money would have completed the sale, extinguishing the claim to the hills forever. The account has sat untouched in the Treasury ever since, compounding. It is now worth well over a billion dollars, and the answer is still no.

This intuition was not the Lakota’s alone. It ran through the Indigenous nations of the continent as a shared instinct. Land was not a holding but a relationship: the whole in which ancestors were buried, children were born, and buffalo grazed. On the Great Plains the herds and the ground were a single fabric — destroy one and you have killed the other.

There is a small irony worth pausing on. The line most Americans know by heart on this subject — how can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land — is usually credited to Chief Seattle of the Suquamish. It was in fact written in 1971 by a screenwriter for an environmental film, and attached to his name because the words sounded truer coming from him. The sentiment was real. The West simply had to put it in a Native mouth to hear it.

The destruction of the herds, meanwhile, was no accident.

Interior Secretary Columbus Delano wrote plainly in his 1873 annual report that he would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from the western prairies, regarding it rather as a means of hastening the Indians’ sense of dependence. The Army handed out free ammunition to hide hunters. The famous line about buffalo hunters doing more to settle the Indian question than the regular army ever had is usually attributed to General Philip H. Sheridan, but it reaches us only through a hunter’s memoir published in 1907, decades after the fact, and historians treat both the wording and the attribution with caution — but the policy needed no slogan. Tens of millions of animals had roamed those plains. By 1889 a Smithsonian survey could locate 541 of them left in the United States. To take the land, they first went after the land’s heart.

Something else is worth saying about a nation turning down a billion dollars. The first response is usually disbelief. But money is not the point. For the Lakota, accepting that check would mean conceding that a mother has a price. There are things for which the question “how much?” carries its own insult inside it. And the refusal puts a quiet, unsettling question to the modern world: in an age that assumes everything has a price, how many of us still remember that some things do not?

Whoever Labors, Owns

In the modern West, the story of land begins with a philosopher. John Locke, in the seventeenth century, argued that when you mix your labor with a piece of ground — clear it, plant it, build on it — that ground becomes yours. This labor theory laid the foundation for property rights and now sits near the core of nearly every legal system on earth. Christian theology stood beside it: in Genesis, humanity was told to subdue the earth.

A century later William Blackstone put the resulting idea in the most honest terms anyone has managed. Property, he wrote in his Commentaries, is that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. Read slowly, that is a definition of ownership as banishment.

Then came a second doctrine: terra nullius, land belonging to no one. If a people did not work the ground in a form the West recognized — no fences, no title, no plough — the ground counted as vacant and was open to claim. Territories inhabited for thousands of years changed hands “lawfully,” on paper. The tragedy for Sitting Bull’s people was exact: the very reverence with which they held the land was what made that land look empty to Western eyes.

The revealing detail is that this logic was rehearsed inside the West before it was exported. In England, the enclosure movement converted commons open to everyone for centuries into private holdings, and villagers were pushed off ground they had always used. The idea of turning land into a commodity was tried out on Europe’s own poor well before it reached the colonies.

Locke, to his credit, attached a condition to his own argument: appropriation was fair so long as there was still enough, and as good, left for everyone else. That clause is the first thing a finite world deletes. On a crowded continent, or a crowded planet, “enough and as good” stops being available — and the theory keeps running anyway, stripped of the limit its author built into it.

The approach was also extraordinarily productive. It opened the road to modern capitalism, to industrial agriculture, to cities. But behind every fence stayed the story of feet that had once crossed that ground freely. Property brought security, and it also built a world that could say: this is mine, and you may not enter.

Setting the two views side by side, what emerges is that the real difference is not legal but ontological. The disagreement is about what exists. For the Lakota, land is a subject — living, feeling, capable of being in relationship. For the West, land is an object — measurable, divisible, ownable. One tradition sees the human being as a part of the land. The other describes the land as a part of the human being, which is to say, as property.

Where Both Views Are Right

Seeing land not as an infinitely exploitable object but as a network you happen to be standing inside is exactly where modern ecology has arrived, by way of a thousand datasets. The Lakota lived that conclusion for millennia, not as a theory but as a way of life. Part of what we now file under “sustainability” is a kinship they never stopped practicing.

Aldo Leopold reached the same place from the other direction. Writing in the American conservation tradition, he argued that ethics had so far governed relations between people, and between people and society, but never between people and the land — and that the missing step was to stop treating soil, water, plants and animals as property and start treating them as a community we belong to. He called it a land ethic. It reads, from a certain angle, like a Lakota sentence written in the vocabulary of a Wisconsin forester.

That intuition is now echoing in an unexpected place: statute books. New Zealand’s Whanganui River was granted legal personhood in 2017, recognized as an indivisible living whole and as the ancestor of the Whanganui iwi. In Canada, the Magpie River — Muteshekau Shipu to the Innu, for whom it is sacred — received a comparable status. India’s Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganges and Yamuna living entities with rights, though that ruling was subsequently stayed.

So a river is edging out of the category of what and into the category of who. Its flow, its freedom from pollution, the continuity of its ecosystem become interests the law can defend on its behalf.

Where Locke saw an object awaiting improvement, contemporary law is quietly reaching for the Lakota grammar: some beings exist to be in relation with, not to be owned.

And yet. What belongs to no one is also what everyone can claim. The Western approach may have been a necessity for a rapidly filling world. Property rights removed ambiguity — who holds what, which contract governs. Without that clarity there is no large-scale agriculture, no infrastructure, no city. Without secure individual title there is no credit, no mortgage, no long-horizon investment.

Perhaps the future lies in holding both: the security and order the West built, joined to the reverence Indigenous traditions kept. Because protecting land while also living justly upon it is only possible if we stop treating it as either pure property or untouchable taboo.