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400921FB54442D18 t1_jearyb7 wrote

Reply to comment by dratseb in It's becoming increasingly clear that fintech has a fraud problem by marketrent

That's just it; there's no such thing as the "original owners" of any piece of land. Anyone who shows up to any unclaimed land and says "well, this is mine now," is at best stealing from everyone, and at worst simply lying. And anyone who then buys that land from that person is complicit in the theft or lie -- they're purchasing stolen goods.

If you mean land that was stolen from the native peoples who lived on it, then (generally) those native peoples understood the concept that the land belongs to everyone, because it is necessary to support everyone. They wouldn't claim to "own" that land because they rightly recognize that land can't validly be owned by a single entity.

(Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in the nuances of historic land policies among Native American tribes and communities, and I'm even less of an expert in how that played out in other parts of the world. I live in the American West, where you pick up a lot of this stuff by osmosis, but if someone with a formal education in this area wants to clarify what I'm saying, corrections are welcome.)

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lanahci t1_jebjuwu wrote

Didn’t the tribes raid each other for better hunting grounds? Their belief that land can’t be owned seems to just be a severe lag in civilization development.

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SomeSwordsCutDeep t1_jebxno3 wrote

The Navajo people, whom live in the Southwest on the borders of Arizona and New Mexico and have by land area the largest reservation in the US are Athabascan -- aka, Pacific Northwestern. They showed up in that area as conquerors not long before the Spanish showed up. Some of the other tribes and native people still harbor resentment that the borders got drawn when they did, because they were working on repelling them. To the point that as a kid, when we'd have field trips to various natives monuments or communities, different native kids from different tribes would not go to depending upon which tribe / monument we were visiting.

And they very much did believe in the thought of owning land; they just didn't have property deeds written out, and have communal thoughts on more things, but still had the concept of private residences and private belongings, and private separate spaces to exist in. There's still a bit of the noble savage myth going on and circulating around a lot of this (the various tribes and people that compromise the native americans were really fairly typical stone age societies).

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