Process involved in the “modernization” of farming that systematically removed access to land used in common for agriculture in favor of two main ownership alternatives: state and private ownership.
Private ownership was seen as the goal to encourage individual initiative, as well as to prompt labor force participation by those unable to afford land. This significant historical shift in Euro-centric understandings of agricultural land relationships coincided with the colonial settlement of the United States, contributing ideological emphasis to the “land rights” discourses that persist in complicating discussions of public and community claims to land. It is notable that early colonial settlements under multiple settler cultures included commons that were later redivided to reinforce modern individual farming ideals.
It remains challenging for land holding to be assigned to a community without legal personality, or formal entity status, although Minnesota Indigenous communities have been part of the conversations that led to the Aotearoa New Zealand precedents of landforms gaining legal personhood, including the Whangenui River (see the Te Awa Tupua Whanganui River Settlement) and the Te Urewera Forest.
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