...for my part of the conversation. I just discovered him this summer, and so far I've read three of his books in reverse order: "Collapse" (most-focused on comparative study of civilizations), "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (a broader perspective), and "The Third Chimpanzee" (you'd be correct to guess that I'm a sucker for theses that weave in a little primatology).
The terms "Native American" is as awkward as any label imposed on a people by outsiders. Like "aborigine", it's hardly the name a people would give themselves in anticipation of the need to distinguish themselves from later arrivals. "Indian" is amusingly ambiguous, and because the Native Americans never achieved large-scale political integration, they never developed an all-encompassing label for themselves (beyond, I'd assume, terms that translate to "The People" and "Us"). RNE could correct me if I'm wrong. That seems like a handicap for a people. Identities like "American" or "Japanese" are a powerful binding force in a society and give it the power to take united action. It's yet another interesting "what-if" line of inquiry to imagine how things might've turned out if the NAs had had just a few more centuries to develop in isolation. I've read a couple of Orson Scott Card's "Alvin Maker" books, and he seems to be exploring just that alternate universe. In Alvin's universe lack of political unity on the European side provided just enough breathing room for the NAs to achieve it, and a balance of power was worked out.
Note that property rights started to become an issue when cultivated land became a major source of support.
I can guess that you're hinting at the assertion that property rights are so fundamental to human civilization as to be considered almost a law of nature. I'd approach the question the same way I approach analysis of the marketplace, and contrast the modern concepts with their original forms. Just as the modern marketplace bears little resemblance to what Adam Smith described, modern property rights have expanded to such an extent as to be unrecognizable.
Of course people defened their farms and homes; they were defending in its most tangible form their food supply.
But just as a NA might be baffled by the concept of land ownership, an 18th century landowner might be baffled by the concept of intellectual property rights. People can own an idea? Where do you build the fence? Somebody else owns the content of the books on my shelf? What?
What started out as a functional necessity has been abstracted into a tool for wealth creation--another weapon in the game. It's part of the gaming of the free market that began when Smith published his cheat sheet in 1775: Property rights can be used to create artificial scarcities, and putting a thumb on the scale of supply-and-demand increases profit.
Even the modern analog to farmland, residential real estate, hasn't escaped the curse despite its eminently tangible nature. People treat real estate as an investment rather than a home and begin to think like speculators, inevitably inflating the value of housing far beyond what a rational marketplace would determine. The economic behavior of real estate has been decoupled from its inherent utilitarian value and tied to abstract (and emotion-driven) marketplaces like the money supply and the stock market.
Have I changed your mind about the sanctity of private property? Hey, that's great, Tom...well, I can dream, can't I?