The air at the edge of the Highwood Mountains of eastern Montana smelled of dry grass, scant water and, faintly, of hay. Just out of sight of the house and barn my ancestors built, I stopped at a pull-out bordered by patches of short white sage. Aspens and willows, entangled with barbed wire, hid the creek that rushed by lower down. Aside from the sound of water moving behind that wiry private property line, it was utterly quiet.
My mother grew up on a ranch just north of here. It’s a region she’s always longing to return to, and even though I’ve never lived here, the very dirt molecules feel like home to me, too. I was born and raised in a different Montana landscape, in a valley surrounded by the Rockies and their evergreen forests a few hours from here.
Even though we rarely visited my mother’s relatives, my upbringing was saturated with pride in our ancestors: homesteaders, people who carved out lives for themselves on land that was never meant to support the wheat and cattle they were determined to raise on it.
This pride in ancestry is as common as knapweed in Montana. It’s expressed in our political campaigns — this year’s are no exception — and in our public comments, which serve as a form of social currency: “I’m a fourth-generation Montanan.” “I’m a third-generation Montana farmer.” “My family’s been stewarding this land for five generations.” I’ve used versions of these phrases myself, especially when speaking to state legislators who would otherwise never listen to me.
This insistence on the primacy of heritage rings loudest in response to perceived “government overreach” or interference from “outside interests,” especially when those interests support, say, clean water or wildlife habitat. It’s as if the more generations you can tack on to your settler-homesteader family tree, the more right you have to determine other people’s relationships to this place.
I can trace my Montana family directly back five generations to a Danish couple, Henry and Anna Hansen, who proved up a homestead claim and built a life here with their five sons and a daughter. But that fact is actually an admission of the most egregious government overreach of all: Every foot of this land, every speck of dirt, was stolen from somebody else, including the acres that benefited my own family.
Before my ancestors took advantage of the expanded Homestead Act in 1911, the ranch they later owned was part of a vast landscape that was home to Blackfoot, Apsáalooke, Métis, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla peoples, all of whom had relationships with this place specific to their own cultures and traditions. Rosalyn LaPier, an ethnobotanist and environmental historian who is Métis and an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana, has written of the many different relationships Native nations have had with bison, for example — each of them unique and each involving that nation’s own co-relationships with Earth and creation. “Over thousands of years and across diverse landscapes,” LaPier wrote, “Indigenous peoples developed … religious customs and sacred places important to their relationship with bison.” None of those relationships involved absolute private ownership of land.
“Property isn’t about a right of possession. It’s a right of domination.”
“Property isn’t about a right of possession,” Steven Newcomb, a Shawnee and Lenape scholar and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, has said. “It’s a right of domination.” Private ownership brutally upends land, water and wildlife, and strips away relationships, replacing them with domination and violence. And it has been doing so since long before colonists imposed themselves on North America.
In England, as early as the 13th century, the nobility started stealing commonly shared land for private benefit, enclosing it with walls, ditches or hedges and evicting the people living there. Generations-long residence and deeply held land relationships provided no protection: Landlords like Sir Robert Palmer, who was able to cheaply purchase land confiscated from Tewkesbury Abbey in 1540, evicted entire villages of people. As Scottish writer Andro Linklater detailed in his book Owning the Earth, enclosures shattered a system of mutual obligations under which tenant farmers had access to common land for grazing as well as for foraging, gleaning and gathering firewood. Protection of these rights to the commons was enshrined in law in 1217, in the Magna Carta’s companion document, the Charter of the Forest. “Enclosure” is a softer way of saying “theft,” but theft is what it was.
In North America, it’s often assumed that private land ownership not only existed in colonizing cultures but was also universally accepted. Yet English commoners fought against privatization for centuries, dying by the tens of thousands to defend the rights of the commons. Even as English colonists were arriving on the Atlantic shores of North America, commoners violently resisted enclosure. The Midland Revolt, involving rebellions in several English counties in 1607, was a direct consequence of the government’s admitted failure to enforce its own laws against enclosure’s theft of the commons.
“Between 1725 and 1825” alone, commons scholar Peter Linebaugh wrote in Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, “nearly four thousand enclosure acts appropriated more than six million acres of land, about a quarter of cultivated acreage, to the politically dominant landowners.” In The Book of Trespass, which details the injustices of private landownership in Britain, Nick Hayes noted that 150,000 people in 18 villages were evicted in a single instance.
My ancestors were able to claim private ownership of land in Montana because the story of private property as a timeless, uncontested institution has been reinforced and defended by the powerful, often with violence. But that story has deliberately erased generations of organized and determined resistance to privatization.
Human history has been shaped in large part by people caring for and living with land, water and animals as part of the carefully managed commons. England prior to enforced enclosures is just one example among hundreds. Montana’s own constitutional “right to a clean and healthful environment” could serve as the foundation of a kind of commons — if, instead of being ignored in favor of perceived private property rights, it is defended, as it has been in several state Supreme Court cases involving mineral leases and mining exploration and in the state’s stream access laws, which strongly favor public rather than private rights.
Private property rights are often described as a bundle of sticks, the idea being that each right, or stick, in the bundle should be negotiated alongside an owner’s obligations and the community’s needs. Communities and individual owners can agree, for example, that the “right” to pollute a watershed or drain a wetland should be overruled to protect both people and ecosystems. Such negotiations reflect an ancient understanding of the interplay between mutual responsibilities and rights of use. Treating land ownership as absolute and inviolable, on the other hand, compounds the injustices that have built upon one another for centuries.
The story of the barbed wire fencing and “No Trespassing” signs that trace property lines across the West, even the story of the title deeds and homesteader claims in my ancestors’ names — all of this is the story of private property’s violent history. But the pronghorn racing and streams running across those property lines, and the smell of the sage and the rustle of aspens disregarding the barrier of fencing, tell a different, much older, story.
The prevailing version of land ownership has been used not only to steal entire continents, but also to vilify any and all suggested limitations on landowners’ rights of use — preventing many communities from effectively protecting the local wildlife, waterways, the climate and themselves. It has turned a bundle of sticks into a powerful weapon that dominates land use and daily life.
Those of us who have directly benefited from the theft and privatization of North American land must face the reality of that history and its consequences. Expressing pride in a family’s ownership and responsible stewardship over three, four or five generations ignores all those who have lived here for 30 generations or even longer, as if generations of residence and relationship only matter when they apply to the descendants of white claimants.
The resistance to land privatization throughout Europe over the past thousand years or so reveals the underlying truth: The so-called “right” to abuse and dominate land and exclude others from it — a right known as “ownership”— has been stolen from all the other forms of life, hidden away within the bundle of sticks that so many wish to keep wound tightly together.
Domination has no place in our relationship with land. But care, community and mutual responsibility do. Perhaps the reason so many want to ensure private property rights remain unexamined is that a closer look would reveal obligations as ancient as the commons themselves.
Antonia Malchik writes On the Commons, a newsletter about the commons, private property, and humanity’s relationship with ownership, ecosystems, and one another. Her book A Walking Life explores walking’s role in our shared humanity.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
