American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Native American patterns of landownership among the Munsee- and Mahican-speaking peoples of the colonial Hudson Valley represented a set of practices that ranged from the communal landholding of larger political groups down to land held by individual families. At times these Indian groups treated their lands as cohesive homelands, and at other times they acted as if lands belonged to particular families. This article suggests that these practices sprang from a flexible political system where power was widely dispersed. Which pattern of landholding predominated at any given time depended on circumstances particular to each historical moment.