Understanding Private Property : Land as a Relationship, Property as a Construct

IntroductionThis paper examines the ontological roots of the Western 1 socioeconomic system of private property as it developed in North America.The hegemony of Western-style private property as an economic system of organizing the material world, and its ability to drive out alternative property regimes, is prevalent.It is fundamentally linked with the concepts of individual freedom and equality.However, private property has for the most part been decoupled from its particular ontological roots, which have in turn made it appear natural and apolitical, a "commonsense system."Of course, its affiliations to capitalism are clear, and in the increasing neoliberalization of social policies, our understanding of private property needs to be reexamined.Most settler societies, such as Canada, are aware of the historical dispossession of land from Indigenous peoples, but the implications of the continued dispossession are less clearly understood or recognized.Racially contingent forms of property and property rights have been created and maintained (Harris, 1993) through continued occupation by settler governments and by the needs of a growing population of "settlers."As the colonists in settler societies have never left, this permanent occupation is justified by very old colonial constructs of entitlement, that have now become lost in historically situated guilt, as well as current white settler privilege.As the legitimacy of continued settler occupation is argued to necessitate the seizure and privatization of Indigenous lands (Bonds & Inwood, 2016;Pasternak, 2015), the claims to freedom and equality that are promoted by proponents of private property are called to question.Although title to most Indigenous reserve land in North America continues to be held, and in many cases administered, by the state, versions of private property designed to assimilate Native communities and their lands into the wider Euro-American socioeconomic way of life have been implemented and failed with devastating effects more than once in colonial government policy.The most recent round of land privatization policy initiatives, which cite greater autonomy, equality, and resource development for Indigenous communities as moral rationales, have

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