Tuesday, February 17, 2026
Land, Title and Ownership in America at 250 series
In 1705, before there was a United States, a Supreme Court, or anything resembling modern federal Indian law, a land dispute began in Connecticut that would stretch nearly 70 years…and would not be fully resolved for another 220 years.
Mohegan Indians v. Connecticut doesn’t come up often in casual conversation. It isn’t a dramatic courtroom story. There’s no single sweeping opinion to quote. What it offers instead is something understated and, in some ways, more telling: a glimpse of how unsettled land ownership really was in early America.
At the heart of the dispute was the Mohegan claim that their lands fell under the protection of the Crown, meaning the colony itself had no independent authority to convey them. Connecticut, on the other hand, considered the land as falling under its governing authority and conveyed portions of it to settlers. From the colony’s perspective, this was administration. From the Mohegan perspective, it was dispossession.
What makes the case unusual is what happened next. The Mohegan did not simply accept the colony’s position, nor did they confine the dispute to Connecticut’s courts. They appealed to the British Crown. The matter eventually made its way before imperial commissioners and, ultimately, to the Privy Council in London.
Let’s pause there for a moment.
An Indigenous nation petitioning the highest authority in the British Empire over a land title dispute in North America, decades before independence. That fact alone complicates the tidy version of colonial land development we sometimes learn, and teach.
The proceedings were slow and politically charged. Commissions were formed and challenged. Decisions were questioned. Years passed. Leadership changed. Generations turned over. By the time the matter was finally resolved in 1773 (against the Mohegan) the colonies themselves were on the brink of revolution.
Underneath all of it sat questions that would not disappear with independence; Who had authority to convey Indigenous land? Were tribal nations sovereign actors capable of holding and defending title? Or were they subjects within a colonial system that ultimately controlled land distribution?
Those questions would resurface in early U.S. Supreme Court cases such as Johnson v. M’Intosh and Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. By then, the language had hardened into doctrine: discovery, occupancy, domestic dependent nations. But the tension itself was not new. It had already been argued across decades and an ocean.
For those of us who spend our days around land records and title chains, it’s an interesting reminder. Early American land transfers were not simply administrative acts recorded in tidy ledgers. They were layered over contested authority and competing understandings of ownership.
We tend to look at a chain of title as a sequence — grant, patent, conveyance, mortgage — each step building on the last. What cases like this remind us is that some of those early links were forged in deep disagreement about who had the power to create them in the first place.
The Mohegan eventually lost. Connecticut retained control. The mechanisms of colonial land distribution moved forward.
But the fact that the dispute was heard, that it was litigated for decades at the highest imperial levels, tells us something important. Indigenous land claims were not invisible in the eighteenth century. They were argued, formally and persistently, inside the legal framework of the empire.
That history doesn’t sit on the surface of today’s property transactions. It doesn’t show up in a routine title search. Yet it is part of the legal soil beneath modern American real estate law.
And if you work in this industry long enough, you really appreciate that the surface is never the whole story.
I invite you to read more about it here. It’s a fascinating saga that continued through the centuries, finally reaching its ultimate resolution in 1994 when Congress legislated the Land Claim Settlement Act. In exchange for congressional approval of gaming rights for the Mohegan Nation, the Mohegans released all claims against Connecticut for prior land rights and transferred the 800 acres of remaining Mohegan land in reserve to the United States to be held in trust for the tribe. In 1996, Mohegan Sun casino opened on a portion of the reserved land.
Post Script: For those of us who pay close attention to today’s Supreme Court, it’s hard not to see traces of these early disputes in modern opinions, especially in the writings of Justice Neil Gorsuch. Justice Gorsuch, famous for holding the United States to its word with tribal nations, famously wrote in 2020’s McGirt v. Oklahoma, “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise.”
Until Next Time,
Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC