What differences were there between the way the native Americans viewed land ownership and the way europeans viewed it?

Answer 1

Native Americans believed that they were apart of nature. They also believed that the land was sacred and have been given to them to live on and to use. Europeans believed you must kill, take over, or destroy the people that claimed it in order for the Europeans to claim the land.

Answer 2

This is a complicated question that requires ownership to be defined as each saw it. Please also understand that when talking about Native Tribes, there are a large number of these tribes and I speak only in general terms about them; as some had slightly different concepts. Ownership by Exclusion is the key to understanding the differences between European values and Native values. Both felt you could 'own' the land, possession being ownership; but the Natives as a general rule did not believe you could exclude another from it while that was the very definition of the term by European standards.

Once Native tribes learned that this was the definition by the new people, they then began to make these claims to exclude them, while remaining (at least generally) socialist about property ownership among the tribe. Native American tribes were a very long practiced form of socialist government, and too few remain so today.