Concerning to the Amazon Region, we have two recent PhD dissertations (by Francivaldo Alves Nunes and Eliana Ramos Ferreira) that explain the process of land commodification after the “Lei de Terras” of 1850. I can send you the both dissertations or even put you in touch with them.

O sentido de domínio de área faz parte do reino animal, de marcar territórios para garantir a sobrevivência e de perpetuação da espécie. Dessa forma, os leões, cães, etc. marcam o espaço com a urina que contém outros avisos. Neste sentido a raça humana marcou inicialmente estes espaços obedecendo os instintos de sobrevivência. Seria a fase da coleta, da caça, etc. no domínio do extrativismo.

Com o surgimento da troca, o espaço passa a ganhar valor econômico além da sobrevivência primitiva (alimento e reprodução). Surgem formas de controle, criam se leis, inventa o arame farpado, religião, força militar, formas de governo, etc. Criam diferentes tipos de propriedade: privada, pública, livre acesso e propriedade comum. Todos não apresentem nenhuma garantia de conservação e preservação dos recursos naturais.  Com o mercado, a valorização dos recursos, seja privada, pública, etc. passa a ser importante.  Monopólio, oligopólio, livre concorrência, comunismo, socialismo, desenvolvimento tecnológico, etc. surgem para controlar estes recursos, mas todos não tem garantia de conservação dos recursos naturais. Com o mercado pessoas ou objetos são a mesma coisa, dai a razão do surgimento do tráfico negreiro, que nada mas foi do que um extrativismo humano, antes restrita a presas de guerra. 

A privatização não se restringe a objetos visíveis mas também invisíveis, onde se demarca também algo por descobrir, como ocorre muito com recursos minerais.

Dessa forma a pergunta acima pode ser respondida através da teoria do extrativismo, do desequilíbrio entre a sustentabilidade econômica e a sustentabilidade biológica. Nem sempre a sustentabilidade biológica garante a sustentabilidade econômica e vice versa.

HI I am currently carrying out research on the development (or lack of) territoriality of land in the Sinai, Egypt by Bedouin tribes. They mapped out areas and developed borders between different tribes based on two main criteria: Firstly its use as pasture for their herds and secondly their rights as guides accompanying pilgirms and other travellers through the land. In the end the second was more important than the first because grazing lands were sparse and often needed to be shared.  I have been looking at the legal origins of private property in Europe and North America - e.g. Elements of Land Law (Grey Oxford UP 2009) and Benton's A Search for Sovereignty (Cambridge UP 2010) .

I am studying indigenous mexican communities; some are in a process of keeping communal land and others are dividing and privatizing the land. My point is that in this process they have several informal and "de facto" options between private land and communal land understood in law terms. I have noted that there is a process of individualization of land, not privatizacion, when community authorities, which were the main distributors of land, lose power and capacity to meet basic needs. This individualization of land means that they can transfer the land or lease it but they still have to pay some tribute to the community authorities to keep land . I think, but I am not sure, that in transitional contexts may be more options than the binary distinctions between freehold individual land or communal controled land.

The Christian missionars said, that it is Gods land, and as ministers of God they can lease or sell the land. 

In similar way argue indiegenious american people by owning the land given to them by the white buffalo calf woman.

I thought Canada was included in the 1800's adoption of the Torrens system of Real Land recordings.  The Torrens system of documentation was established in Australia in about 1858 I think.(Robert Torrens was the Registrar-General of Deeds in Australia at the time. Adopted by Vancouver in 1860's and then other parts of British Columbia, as well as spreading into NZ by the 1870's and other parts of British Colonies. 

Hope I haven't misunderstood the question.

A general answer to the question is that when land accrues value because of the amount of capital and labour put into it, those making the inputs want to keep it. Societies that have fixed field agriculture--rather than shifting cultivation--have permanent land ownership, and they also have kinship systems through which land is bequeathed from generation to generation.

I suggest you see the humorous but fiercely critial history of the private ownership of land--victorious over public ownership--came to be by Anatole France in his classic novel Penguin Island. 

Matters of this kind are discussed in such contexts as domestic life and how men have seen women on my website An Anthropologist Meets Aesthetic Realism.

http://www.perey-anthropology.net

David Schak's answer above certainly is correct in terms of general human social evolution with changing adaptations and interactions with land and the resources on, and in the land, and adjacent social groups-both friendly and hostile.

 Your question focuses on the emergence of territory when furbearers are monetized in the historical record.  There's a robust body of literature about this period and process in the historical and anthropological literature.

Calvin Martin's Keepers of the Game is a valuable source, and the literature in the "ecological Indian" discussion/debate is readily accessible. 

      In Alaska, the fur-trapping period did lead to the evolution of territories and individually owned traplines.  This continues in some areas of the state to the present time.  Some literature sources about this include:

 Robert, Michelle

    1984  Trapping Patterns in the Vicinity of the Kaiyuh Flats, West Central Alaska.  Technical Paper No. 84.  Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence, Fairbanks, Alaska.

 Stanek, Ronald T.

    1987  Historical And Contemporary Trapping In The Western Susitna Basin.  Technical Paper No. 134.  Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence, Juneau, Alaska.

 Wolfe, Robert J.

    1991  Trapping In Alaska Communities With Mixed, Subsistence-Cash Economies.  Technical Paper No. 217.  Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence, Juneau, Alaska.

 Andersen, David B.

    1993  Trapping In Alaska and the European Economic Community Import Ban on Furs Taken With Leghold Traps.  Technical Paper No. 223.  Alaska, Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence, Juneau, Alaska.

(All available at  http://www.adfg.alaska.gov)

Other sources which discusses this in some detail include:

VanStone, James W.

    1963  Changing Patterns of Indian Trapping in the Canadian Subarctic.  Arctic 16(3):158-174.

 Nelson, Richard K.

    1973  Hunters of the Northern Forest.  University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

 Nelson, Richard K., Kathleen H. Mautner and G. Ray Bane

    1982  Tracks in the Wildland: A Portrayal of Koyukon and Nunamiut Subsistence.  Occasional Paper No. 9.  Anthropology and Historic Preservation, Cooperative Park Studies Unit, University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK.

Another area of resource “ownership” is in fisheries.  Anthropologists have reported on this throughout the world, as fisheries become increasingly commercialized, and locally based, sustainable subsistence fisheries are threatened.  The fisheries literature provides analogues for land-based territorial ownership.

Lastly, the concept of “territory” and “nations” is well documented for the Inupiaq Eskimo region of Alaska by the late Ernest S. “Tiger” Burch, Jr.’s research and writings.  See:

Burch, Ernest S., Jr.

    1998  The Iñupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska.  University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks, AK.

    2005  Alliance and Conflict – The World System of the Iñupiaq Eskimos.  (Co-publication with the University of Calgary Press and the Arctic Institute of North America, Northern Lights Series No. 7).  University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska.

    2006  Social Life in Northwest Alaska - The Structure of Iñupiaq Eskimo Nations.  University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks, Alaska.

 I would be interested in hearing if these sources are of interest and helpful to you in your research, and also to get any copies of papers, articles, etc. resulting from your research.

There is no temporal fix of origin of private property but it was discussed much before Marx and Engel by Plato and Aristotle. Hobhouse has explained property as a means to control over society which evolved with the origin of family. this was further explained by Engel's in his  book on the Origins of family and Private Property. Moreover, there are significant discussions by modern social thinkers who consider property itself as an institution bound by social, cultural and legal  norms. Both customary and statutory defined norms applicable in the case of land as property. Polanyi has discussed land as a fictitious property.

Devastation can be through human disease, enslavement, and, dispossession. In the case of most Spanish Missions in Mexico to Argentina, Jesuits until 1667 established fuedalesque economies based first on indigenous labor exploitation and second by attempts of other Spaniards to establish legal title against traditional land users through legal imposition. Dispossession occurred by the Crown's declaration of indigenous lands as tierras baldios (wildlands) that had no owners, because only Baptized Indigenous could be in the mission system, and then only after many years become citizens, if ever. In Northern Mexico (Sonora state) the Akimel O'odham (Pima) died at a rate of 62% in the southern lowlands from the plague. The rate was 65% for the upper desert area. (Radding) The biological attack was deadly due to vulnerable immune systems of indigenous peoples who are not genetically the same as European who had generations of adjustment to the disease. The Plague in the Middle ages occurred in the 1300's having spread from China where a 90% death mortality rate in one northern province. The Plague (Black death) can survive in some strains without human hosts for 20 years and favors humid temperate zones without freezing. Jews in Europe, 3,000 of them, were killed in Germany by Christian mobs who blamed them. Jews then migrated to Eastern Europe.

Rates vary but reached 75% and 50% of come Cherokee communities after contact, as well. The Incan Empire was finally defeated due to the plague.

Property should be distinguished from territory for indigenous communities. Territory was commonly defended, property much less so given the mobility of indigenous for resource gathering. Sedentary tribes also usually held all territory in common, no one owned it, everyone owned it.  Family farming plots were often respected for their produce belonging to the family that worked it. Reciprocity was a social mechanism to distribute food to less able and less productive members in the group.

The commodification of beaver pelts is little different than the extinction of Buffalo. the introduction of mass demand paid for with tangible goods or currency where viable trade can over-harvest any natural specie in a given area. I think the Cree and other fur traders defended territory for its use and access to beaver, in that sense a value ranking of territorial areas appeared and was defended. Similar assertions in terms of trade are recorded for the Saux Tribe from Wisconsin state in the Great Lakes region (US side) were expelled from a prominent entry area of a lake given their installation of a taxation system for access to the water way. They were attacked by two other tribes and the French with gun boats to open the passageway and eliminate the bottleneck.  Declaring and holding property was not key to survival, but  access to the resource was.

And just to remind you also Jean-Jacques Rousseau who in his 'Discourse on Inequality' (1754) stated:

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

I suggest one possible aspect to the question of origin is to be found in the cultural practice of public recognition of 'ownership' of harvested game, by hunters. This allows the 'owner' to perform a ceremonial redistribution of the animal corpse, particularly in those cases where meat arrives in large quantities. Then, in the context in which sedentary game animals, or animals that regularly congregate at specific locations, it is advantageous to "manage" these populations. Kinship was an obvious vehicle to pass on the position that involves obligation to maintain the lands and the benefit to have priority over the harvest. Agriculture only ratchets up this focus on specific parcels of land a bit. Where do you draw the line to say on this side is 'ownership', and this side is some lesser interest in specific bits of land?

Correction on previous entry. Jesuits were in the Americas until 1767, having entered in Brazil in 1549. After 1767 Franciscans took over the missions under the Spanish Crown.

The system of ownership of land is a colonial practice and modified to suit the needs of  colonial control of resources. The land ownership is not based on sustainability of ecosystems but the exploitation of resources that became commodities of monetary exchange, excluding relationships of Indigenous people who believed in sustainability. This practice exists in modern contemporary society, look at the results on the environment, and the Indigenous people that depended on environment suffering in poverty and slowly growing in validity with their Indigenous Knowledge in education. The control of indigenous people in North America is Legislation known as the Indian Act. It created a very dependant,un-sustainable existence that requires resilience to exist as a human being, as our endangered language described us, when not designated by Government of the day...such as aboriginal, First Nations, or in earlier descriptions savages!

Very useful reflections and responses.  I thank all of you.

In New England land and territories begin to become differentiated as indigenous groups supply wampum for furs in overexploited ecological niches where fur bearing animals reside. Each river valley moving west became overexploited in a time transgressive fashion. As this occurs, territories and lands got carved out by both indigenous trappers and European players, and when the census-both local and state-became a way to recover land via indigenous debt, colonial overseers  locked in lands by excluding indigenous peoples as a form of documentary genocide. This entire process guaranteed white entitlement to lands.

For Robert Walker and people that answered his question:

As I told in my book on the Mbya Guarani people (see below, "Citation"), the main source of "privatization" (being personal owner of) is the mammalian territorialism. The territorial behavior is genomic based. But in the case of Homo sapiens "cultural evolution" and "biological evolution" are overlapped. Privatization is a process with different steps of complexity. In most of hunters and foraging people, the territory is a temporary situation where a piece of ecosystems remains under control or protection. When leaving such area, the "active" territory disappears. Nevertheless the "territorial behavior" acts in many universes of the daily life of people not having established "private property of lands". E.g. the inner concept of "property" is extended to objects, like neck rests in lot of ancient indigenous groups in Africa. Neck rest is a "personal" object. When "his owner" dies, such neck rest is broken. The "property" of objects for a single generation (a single person) defines one of the universes of privatization processes. From this simple process lot of derivatives could be considered prior to agriculture and urban revolutions, among them: a) The property of domestic animals and plants in cultures without husbandry and agriculture; b) The mutual property in couples, where each member considers the remaining member as his or her property (there is lot of killings vis-à-vis this kind of "property") and c) Slavery, when a person "owns" people and traffic them. In most of these derivatives the concept of property is generational, not intergenerational. The property began and ends in the lifetime of a single owner.

Everything changed with agriculture revolutions (the invention and spread of short food chains) and his main products, urban revolutions, that is, from nomadic and semi-nomadic behavior to sedentary behavior. In these new systems lot of generations remained in the same place. The same kinds of property we defined for hunters and foraging people suffered cultural changes in front of new space and temporal realities. "My" land and "my" house (both based in sedentary contexts) were developed as a consequence of previously existent patterns of "property". Most of main kinds of properties (land property, house property, and domestic animals' property) attained a new state of complexity with the trans-generational concept of property. The transmittal of "titles" of properties through generations was one of the most spectacular derivatives of the genome-based territorial behavior. The same happened with new and extended categories of property: individual property, familiar property, "group" property, state property etc. Territorial violence among territorial peoples not having the concept of "private property" was transformed in violence associated with permanent defended territories (e.g. countries). Wars have been ways for "solving" (sic) problems of property of territories, and violent invasions the ways for "adding" more territory (or creating new ones).

Each new added cultural complexity was considered in this context of privatization, creating "new" kinds of properties: property of ideas and information (copyrights), company names and products (trademarks), and more recently, the "property" of genes and species, one of the most spectacular and insane derivatives of the old territorial behavior of hunters and foraging peoples.

Unfortunately, in terms of long term adaptation and survival, the rigidifying of "soft" and flexible systems is extremely dangerous.

Citation: Montenegro, R.A. 2006. "El silencioso genocidio de los Mbya Guarani. Estudio etnoecológico en comunidades que lograron recuperar sus tierras ancestrales". Ed. FUNAM, Córdoba, Argentina, 231 p. To be re published by Université de Franche Comté in France (in press).

One such still vivid and practiced example of given land to humans is the white buffalo calf woman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Buffalo_Calf_Woman

or even the promised land given to Moses.

Since the question talks of territories "near Quebec", during the height of the fur trade traplines were mostly help through customary law, not privatized by the trappers. Beaver populations dipped seriously at the beginig of the 20th century, and reserves were set up by the provincial Government in 1932 in order to help restore them. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries some high-value species, such as mink, have been farmed on private lands by compagnies such as Holt Renfrew.  

You can see how during Christianization of Europe it worked if you search for "Donatio Constantini“, a forged imperial decree, and the Symmachean forgeries.

Similar it worked with Christian names giving of territories.

A date for the described process would be helpful for a more nuanced answer. In broad terms, up to the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic reforms across Western Europe, medieval feudal land ownership prevailed in Europe for about a millennium after the Germanic tribes overran the Roman Empire with its landed property based on colonialism avant la lettre. Feudal tenure was a main driver of emigration of European peasants to the New World. Freeholds as you seem to describe for Canada only developed in the source countries of the New World colonists after Napoleon, say two centuries ago.

On your second point, the relation between landed property and biological resources, the attached may be of interest.

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