Occupancy rights: life planners and the Navajos

ABSTRACT

This Comment focuses on the limitations of Stilz’s individualist conception of occupancy rights. Her account of occupancy is critical to her attempt to answer the question of where one holds territorial rights as well as related place-related rights like the right of return. Her account appeals to the geographical location of individual life plans. This Comment argues that this fails to distinguish between Indigenous People who are connected historically and in many other ways to a place and individual Life-Planners: it treats the two as equivalent, which I argue is counter-intuitive. I also argue that Stilz’s occupancy account fails to explain the scope of occupancy rights in a number of cases that she appeals to in her examples, such as the Navajos’ expulsion from the area in which they lived. What she needs, I argue, is a group based conception of occupancy rights, in addition to the idea of individual rights of residency.