When President Donald Trump dismissed Greenland as “a piece of ice” in his Davos speech, the offhand line jolted many listeners. Greenland has been home to people—mostly Inuit—for nearly five thousand years and today supports a population of more than 56,000. The comment also tapped into a long pattern in which colonial powers treated already‑inhabited territories as empty or available, imposing their own frameworks of ownership and governance while overlooking established local systems.
At the heart of that pattern are two different ways of understanding land. Many Indigenous peoples, including Greenland’s Inuit, regard the land as collectively held and stewarded: seasonal hunting, fishing and harvesting cycles; protection of water sources; care for ancestral and ceremonial sites; and rules passed down through community practice. European empires, by contrast, tended to view land as property—an asset to be claimed, partitioned, bought or transferred between states. Landscapes that did not fit European expectations of permanent fields, fences or towns were often dismissed as “unused,” “wild” or “uninhabited” and thereby opened to appropriation.
A 2023 article in Australian Historical Studies documents how British officials in the 18th century used the term “uninhabited” not to mean literally without people but to mean lacking a sovereign or a government that Europeans recognized as “civilized.” Communities could have lived, fished, farmed and named places for millennia and still be excluded from the category of legitimate inhabitants. That definition helped justify state claims to control territory. Four historical examples show how this logic worked in practice:
Alaska: In 1867 the United States purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million—an exchange mocked at the time as “Seward’s Folly” but later valued for its resources and strategic location. The sale was negotiated between empires without consultation with Alaska Native peoples, whose ancestors had occupied the region for at least 10,000 years and organized life around seasonal salmon runs, marine mammal hunting, berry harvesting and culturally significant places. Those Indigenous systems were not recognized in the transfer, which treated Alaska as exchangeable imperial territory.
Australia: For centuries British settlers asserted terra nullius—”land belonging to no one”—despite at least 60,000 years of Aboriginal presence. For Aboriginal peoples, “Country” is an integrated concept of land, water, sky, species and ancestral responsibility, managed through practices such as low‑intensity fire regimes and seasonal mobility. Because these practices did not resemble European farming or permanent enclosures, British authorities concluded there was no recognizable government and declared sovereignty. The doctrine of terra nullius remained in Australian law until the High Court rejected it in 1992, recognizing Indigenous traditional land rights.
North America: Indigenous nations across what became the United States managed resources through seasonal movement and communal systems long before European arrival. Influenced by ideas such as John Locke’s labor theory of property, Europeans judged land to become legitimate private property when visibly “improved”—tilled, built on, fenced. Lands not improved in those ways were labeled available. In 1823 the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. M’Intosh held that Native peoples had rights of occupancy but not the ultimate title recognized by European doctrine, an approach that treated Indigenous groups as occupants rather than full sovereign owners. That legal logic underpinned later policies and controversies, including disputes like the Standing Rock protests over pipeline construction that proceeded without tribal consent.
Southern Africa: Khoekhoe and San peoples organized life around seasonal access to waterholes and grazing, governed by customary, oral rules that protected fragile ecosystems. Dutch and later British settlers, seeing land without fences or permanent enclosures, misread seasonal mobility as “wandering” and territory as vacant, enabling dispossession and imposition of private property regimes. The loss of customary systems continues to drive repatriation and land‑rights efforts.
Across these cases a recurring pattern appears: colonial legal and moral frameworks ignored Indigenous systems of stewardship, labeled differently managed landscapes as vacant or ungoverned, and justified acquisition through state deals that excluded the people who lived there. The result has been enduring dispossession, legal disputes and efforts by Indigenous communities to reclaim rights, recognition and stewardship roles.
Correction: A picture caption previously misstated the date of the Battle of the Little Bighorn as 1903; the battle occurred in 1876 and the image was a 1903 painting of the 1876 event. We apologize for the error.
Edited by: Cristina Burack