In the context of land, property is a legal mechanism for securing the rights to use land.* In the United States, property is often described as a “bundle” of rights granted by the authorities to those who hold the rights to use land.
The principle of land as property has origins in treaties between the United States and Indigenous nations. Although Indigenous people successfully negotiated to retain some of the rights they had always had (e.g. hunting, fishing on their land), ultimately colonists unjustly stole millions of acres of Indigenous land through treaties, which transformed the natural world into private property through specific legal processes still in place to uphold “property.” This established the foundation for the prevailing system of property and land ownership in the United States. (Case, M. (2018). The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land Became US Property. Amsterdam University Press.)
*Property is understood differently depending on context and place
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