Property Ownership

The importance of property ownership depended on where the nation was located and what natural resources the nation used to sustain itself. In the Pacific Northwest, trees and acorns were incredibly important to the community’s diet, so ownership of trees was passed down from mother to daughter. In the east, some Native nations placed emphasis on actual land ownership and, unsurprisingly, women often owned the land. The Algonquin and other North Central nations used markers, like Eurasians, to show where one family’s property began and ended.

Other nations, like the Lenape, thought of ownership more like leasing, where someone had the right to use the land, but that it belonged to the nation as a whole. To the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, women owned the fields they worked, the longhouses, and everything in them. The Hopi women owned the pueblos and the land which was inherited matrilineally.

One early Native source said, “You ought to hear and listen to what we women shall speak…for we are the owners of this land and it is ours.” Native American women engaged in agricultural activity for generations prior to European contact.

On the Great Plains where buffalo were essential and nations migrated to follow them, inheritance rules put emphasis on objects that people moved with them. When these nations, like the Lakota and the Pawnee, got horses brought from Europe, they became the predominant source of wealth. Everyone, even children, had the right to own horses.

Domesticating animals other than horses was rare in Native cultures because they tended to believe that animals had equal spiritual rights as humans and because it disrupted gendered distributions of labor. 

We have few reliable written sources about Native women’s lives before contact with Europeans, so unfortunately we have to turn to white men’s interpretations of Natives for some of our sources. In 1644, the Rev. John Megalopensis, minister at a Dutch Church in New Netherlands (modern day New York) said that Native American women were, “obliged to prepare the Land, to mow, to plant, and do everything; the Men do nothing except hunting, fishing, and going to War against their Enemies” Others described Native women as “slaves'' to the men. These European observers were describing and defining the actions of indigenous people, but filtered through their own lens. Specifically, these white men were witnessing what they saw as aberrations to idealized European gender roles. Some historians have argued that these observations contributed to the racialization of native peoples as “savage” or uncivilized–because their gendered division did not mirror Europeans’ gendered division of labor. The reality was that these European writers didn’t really understand, or care to understand, the way Natives shared the burden of labor.