I think they saw themselves more as stewards of the land. They had their traditional tribal lands. They defended that like other tribes defended theirs. The earth was already here. How could you "own" it?

Seems like when the government offered Red Cloud money for the Lakota tribal territories he grabbed a handful of dirt and a handful of dollar bills and asked which one would not burn in the fire. His point being how could you exchange something permanent for something impermanent.

Do we really own land now? If I don't pay my property taxes I'm pretty sure the government's going to take that too!

The only way I can sort of decipher it is they had a philosophy of "Not my land, not your land but you are my enemy so I will deny you the benefits of the land."

I think after longer contacts with Whites they started to understand the concept.

Still I think historians don't do a good job of explaining it, all seem to be locked into the "Native Americans did not understand the concept of land ownership" and all explain it the same way. But then after explaining that they write about "Lakota land" and "their land." Perhaps they are talking per the treaties drafted by the White men but that is not always the context. Anyway makes me scratch my head.

Another aspect of this that is important is that the approx. 60 million people who lived in all of the Americas in 1492, were spread out much more than the 80 million in Europe (a much tighter area) and had less means to project power at distance.

Nor did they necessarily need to due to the abundance.

But, there was still, of course, conflict over territory and resources.

I'm not sure that all Europeans at every spot in North America prior to the 20th century viewed property rights the same way that we do today. Europeans in the east did, most likely. But did the open range ranchers who never had any legal title to the millions of acres on which they ran cattle and claimed as their own, but never had any "legal" title?

I remember reading something written by one of the early settlers of Albany, Texas. He was asked what the most difficult adjustment was that he had to make moving into the early 20th century. His answer: "That land had value." When he and his family settled in Albany in the 1850s, the next closest European to them to the west was in Denver or Santa Fe. Land was so cheap it was essentially free (As a more modern example, I was on a quail lease for a while near Albany owned by a local widow. She told me that her husband, who was about 40 years older than her, had acquired the land in the 1920s by trading an old used car for it!).

As Europeans continued emigrating to the west and started settling up all of that open land, the west suffered range war after range war between the Europeans themselves over property and property rights.

It may be a bad mistake to try to view the conflicts between the Indians and Europeans solely through the lens of 21st century concepts of property rights and narratives of relative power.

Native nations didn't hold the same concept of property or ownership as one another. Eastern woodlands societies were semi-agrarian and had ranges with traditional farming villages and hunting grounds, but these were not "owned" in a personal property sense. Even with their differences, I would have a hard time identifying one that had concepts of property ownership that was similar to Western European concepts; particularly the idea of perpetual ownership by individuals in exchange for a one-time transfer of goods or money.

Certainly after a few centuries of interactions, they would have been aware of the European beliefs but few adopted them in their own societies. What bothered them most about interacting with Europeans was two things: 1. The perfidy of others in valid deals: just providing some land, knowing they wouldn't get it back, seemed to open them up to more violence and more dispossession by settlers who couldn't find legitimate land holdings. 2. The perfidy in the deal itself: where a very small group of natives were coerced or sometimes forced into "selling" tribal lands that had not been agreed to by the rest of the tribal leadership.

Perfidy? Used twice?

Indians probably had the same understanding as the free range cattle business when barbed wire was being put up across the country. Similar legal stance. Why "own" land when you follow herds.