Collective Rights Over Individual Property

Sor Juana's convent life and her intellectual community illustrate the value of collective life and shared intellectual endeavor beyond individual accumulation. Indigenous peoples across the Americas have historically organized territories and resources through collective governance, clan systems, and communal stewardship rather than individual property ownership. Collective rights frameworks recognize this tradition and resist colonial imposition of individual titling, which fragments territories, severs relationships, and facilitates dispossession through market sale. Under collective rights, territory belongs to the community collectively; individuals have use rights and responsibilities but cannot alienate or sell land because it is not theirs to sell—it belongs to ancestors, current community members, and future generations. For land justice, this means resisting pressures to divide Indigenous territories into individual allotments, privatize resources, or convert communities into property-owning individuals. It supports Indigenous governance structures for managing collective lands, decision-making processes that honor community consensus, and legal frameworks that protect territories from internal sale to outsiders. It centers Indigenous organizational logic rather than imposing Western property concepts that dissolve collective power.