[edblarney]

I think it's possibly more complicated - there's kind of a 'collective ownership' scheme whereby there are tons of people who 'share' ownership of pieces - many of the titles may be lost, people don't know they've effectively inherited them, some may be owned by deceased who have no identifiable heirs so the ownership is ambiguous etc. etc. etc..

[noobermin]

I'm a pacific islander, not a Hawaiian, and while my culture (or rather my parents' culture, of Palau) has somewhat more well defined concepts of land ownership, it is was traditionally somewhat communal with families and clans owning land. It didn't help that in the aftermath of WWII our island was mostly in shambles, and people just set up shop where they could and eventually wound up on other families' land. Today, land court cases in Palau are contentious and common.

Some of the high clan families resorted to charging rent to those who settled on what was traditionally their land, which seems somewhat reasonable than just evicting them, but this still causes some friction because even that isn't really that traditional either, it's not like, AFAICR, we had a concept of rent back then.

Moreover, we never traditionally had a concept of strong property rights or ownership, there are stories that our original contact with Europeans turned violent because my ancestors stole goods from visiting or marooned ships, not because they were thieves but because their concept "ownership" wasn't nearly the same as that of European tradition. To this day, when I visit my parents, my cousins and friends hanging out in my house would just take small things and sometimes not return them, and I would think nothing of it because that's socially acceptable and just how things are.

I think the point I'm making is that this story reminds me somewhat of Palau because it is an attempt to mold two cultures together in certain places where they aren't very congruent. It sounds like there were no "owners" of the land, no one had a title(s), they just lived there because their parents did and their grandparents did and so on. In Palau, people who culturally had no strong concept of ownership have to grapple with some families who do, and it would not surprise you to know that these traditional land-owners are today the wealthier and more politically-connected class, using an amalgam of two cultures, Palauan and Western to their benefit.

I understand how it is difficult here. One person just wants to buy land (in the abstract, Zuck is the sixth wealthiest human on Earth) and have a clear concept of ownership for him/er but they have to contend with people who might not. Like Palau, I don't really know the answer but it's just valuable to be mindful where these issues come from.

[edblarney]

"we never traditionally had a concept of strong property rights or ownership"

Yes, I completely understand that.

I guess what I was trying to say is that Zucks entire problem might boil down to a function of the 'collision' of those two kinds of cultures, as you put it, and the oddities of 'ownership' as they are transcribed from 'Pacific Islander' terms into 'Western legal terms' ...

In Canada we have similar issues with land management, particularly wherein there is resource extraction: the Aboriginal communities have some legal right to input, but how exactly they go about that as a 'clan' is kind of a grey area.