Who Owns This Land?

Greetings from The Melancholy Muse—though perhaps The Confused Muse would be more accurate.

History often leaves me with more questions than answers. As a student of history, I am continually amazed by the stories historians tell—and equally fascinated by the stories they often leave untold.

History is not merely the rise and fall of nations or the victories of kings. It is the widow left to raise three children after her husband dies in battle. It is the frightened child who survives a war he never understood. It is the countless ordinary people whose names never appear in textbooks, but whose suffering shaped every generation that followed.

Those forgotten lives are history, too.

Every story begins somewhere in time and place. This one begins with a simple question that has echoed through centuries:

Who Owns This Land?

The answer appears obvious. Yet history reveals that the answer depends entirely upon who is asked.

Meetings of Different Worlds

As dawn broke over Guanahani, Taíno fishermen tended their nets while others prepared sea turtles and the morning’s catch for their families. Columbus approached his first landfall in the “new” world. The Atlantic Ocean and 70 days of seafaring lay behind him and new adventures awaited. He saw canoes that often carried 80 rowers.

Columbus saw the island as “very flat and with very green trees.” After anchoring the Santa Maria ship, his crew rowed a small boat to the island and he “leaped on shore.” So, awe struck by the new arrivals the indigenous inhabitants, the Taíno, greeted him peacefully. Later accounts claimed some Taíno believe the newcomers came from heaven, but historians debate how accurately this reflect Taíno beliefs.

The island was known to the Lucayan (Taíno) people as Guanahani, meaning “small upper waters land” Columbus renamed it San Salvador (“Holy Savior”) upon arrival.

He encountered a people who already called the islands home. The Lucayan Taíno had lived there for generations, raising families, fishing, farming, trading, and worshipping according to traditions far older than Europe’s knowledge of the Americas.

To them, life continued as it always had. To Columbus, however, everything changed with the raising of a Spanish flag. He claimed the islands for Ferdinand and Isabella, the King, and Queen of Spain. But that raises a question few history books ask:

How can someone claim land that is already inhabited?

Different Worldviews Worlds Apart

The conflict that began in 1492 was not simply military or political. It was philosophical. For most Europeans of the fifteenth century, land could be owned, transferred, inherited, bought, sold, conquered, and granted by kings. For many Indigenous peoples, land belonged to no individual.

People belonged to the land.

The earth provided food, water, shelter, and identity. Human beings functioned as caretakers rather than owners. While different Indigenous nations held different customs, many shared the conviction that the land was something to be respected rather than possessed.

Imagine Columbus asking a Taíno villager, “Who owns this land?” The question itself may have made little sense.

The Taíno could identify who lived there, hunted there, and cared for it. Ownership, as Europeans understood the term, was foreign to their worldview.

Due to a lack of volcanic soil for large agriculture, the Lucayans subsisted on reef fish, conch, and sea turtles. They were able to cultivate maize and sweet potato in small garden plots. Their settlements were small. Archeological work reflects their houses were organized around open plazas. Shell and stone tools were used, and pottery was locally made simple and without decoration.

The Lucayan society was organized under caciques (chiefs). Columbus commented that the people lived without apparent centralized authority. His earliest written source described the Lucayan as unarmed, generous, and naked or lightly adorned. He was viewing them for conversion and labor so not taken as a neutral ethnography. They showed hospitality toward these new strangers.

Land ownership for the Lucayan did not equate to the European understanding. Land was for communal use and not private property. Taíno society organized land and resources around the yucayeque (village community) rather than individual ownership.

The Taíno worldview embedded land within a broader spiritual order governed by zemís, meaning ancestral and nature spirits tied to specific caves, springs, and landscape features. Land wasn’t a possession so much as a set of relationships, with ancestors, with the cacique’s stewardship. One participated in rather than owned.

This is why the 1493 “taking possession” ceremonies (planting a cross, reading a proclamation in Spanish, claiming sovereignty for the Crown) were so one-sided. To the Spanish they were doing a legal-religious ritual claiming title. Taíno’s had no similar understanding, and the Spanish had no understanding that land could not be claimed.

Understanding this difference is essential because Europeans’ and the Taíno were not merely speaking different languages but were speaking from different concepts of reality.

Fray Ramon Pané, who came on the second voyage, learned the language and lived among the people he described as idolaters and worshippers of gods. He spends much ink on describing their religious beliefs.

Columbus’ Own Words

Fortunately, we do not have to guess how Columbus viewed the islanders.

He told us himself. In 1493, after his first voyage, he wrote to Luis De Sant Angel, “I have taken possession for their Highnesses… without opposition.” He also wrote: “I took possession of all these islands for their Highnesses.”

And concerning the people he encountered: “I took by force some of the natives, …all heathens.”

His letter reveals several assumptions. The islands could be claimed for Spain. The inhabitants possessed no government Columbus recognized. Their conversion to Christianity justified Spanish rule. The resources of the islands would benefit Spain.

Whether Columbus believed he was acting honorably is beside the point. His own words reveal a worldview in which discovery, conquest, Christianity, and royal authority worked together.

The Story Continues

The ideas expressed in Columbus’ letter did not end with his voyage.

In 1493, papal decrees later became known collectively as the Doctrine of Discovery, declaring that Christian nations could claim lands inhabited by non-Christians.

Centuries later, the United States Supreme Court relied upon that same principle in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), ruling that Native Americans possessed a right of occupancy but not ultimate ownership of their ancestral lands. These legal rulings are primary sources showing the legal framework that undermined Native land claims.

A worldview that began with a flag planted on a Caribbean island eventually became embedded in law.

Questions Worth Asking

History is often presented as a story of exploration. It should also be told as a story of competing ideas.

What does it mean to own land? Can discovery erase prior possession? Does military power create moral authority? Can one civilization simply declare another’s understanding of the world invalid? How should historians judge the past? Can two cultures define justice differently?

Those questions did not end in 1492. In many ways, we are still debating them today.

So, Who Owns This Land?

The question sounds simple, yet history refuses to give a simple answer. But if no one owns the land, does that make it available for someone else to take? Is land a commodity; an inheritance; or a sacred trust?

Every civilization has answered that question differently.

Hunter-gatherer societies often viewed land as a shared resource for the community. As agriculture developed, families increasingly claimed fields they cultivated. Kingdoms expanded by conquest, and kings declared themselves owners of entire nations. Later, land became something that could be bought, sold, inherited, and taxed. Many Indigenous peoples understood the land differently—not as private property, but as a sacred trust to be cared for and passed to future generations. The Hebrew Scriptures presents yet another worldview: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1). Human beings are not ultimate owners, but stewards.

History, however, has often answered the question in a far less noble way.

Too often, ownership has belonged to those with the power to enforce their claims. Conquest became title. Victory became law. The tragedy is that history rarely asks whether there might have been another way.

Could Europeans and Indigenous peoples have forged a different relationship? Could land have been shared rather than seized? Could cultures have met without one destroying the other? We cannot rewrite history, but we can ask whether the choices made were the only choices possible.

The Taíno will never reclaim the islands Columbus claimed for Spain. Yet their story still asks uncomfortable questions. If the islands belonged to the Taíno, how did they suddenly become Spain’s? Could one explorer claim an entire people simply by planting a flag? And the larger question is this:

Can land truly be “discovered” if it is already home to someone else?

The most important discoveries are not made by explorers, but by readers willing to question what they have always been taught.

The Melancholy Muse explores the overlooked stories of history—especially those that challenge accepted narratives. Every article begins with a question, follows the historical evidence wherever it leads, and invites readers to think critically, discuss respectfully, and continue the journey of discovery.

In the next essay, we will examine one of history’s most enduring assumptions:

Next: Who Really “Discovered” America?

Until then… Follow the Muse.
With every sunset comes a sunrise.

— The Muse Den