• rights, protection, responsibility (such as to pay taxes)
• it is yours, you should be able to do what you want
• rights, protects responsibilities shift over time
  

• alliances and the scale of organization varied according to need
• but groups as embodied in their leaders did have customary rights to areas of land that could be traded
  
• these are more like sovereign rights than ownership
• often it was only some rights that were given up

Other kinds of ownership

• Individuals did own personal property such as clothing and tools
• they weren't very oriented towards accumulating goods and tended to give away what they didn't need
• individual families had the right to land they were farming and living on, but that wasn't a permanent right, only while they were using it
• what could be traded was the right to the use and product of the land (usufruct rights)
• permanent tools like weirs might belong to a kin group
• no rights were owned to very plentiful things like migratory birds, but traps were owned
• ownership was not of the land but of its products

The English applied their own definitions of ownership, which the Indians did not understand

• The English had several different forms of land ownership, with different responsibilities to the king
• the king claimed the land and the organizers of a colony granted it to groups of settlers to form towns
• land was divided among families according to what they could farm
• that land ownership was permanent and transferable, but rights were limited and included rights to meadows and woodlots, sometimes as common land, as well as farmland
• defining land primarily by its boundaries was a new idea developed by the European settlers

To what extent were colonial towns a market society?