I think what you are getting at here is the practice of private property codified in a legal system? It is absolutely not true that Indigenous peoples "lacked" the idea of landownership, however, they did not, of course, practice land use in the same way as European colonizers that is the specific historical instance of private property as we know it today- this, however, absolutely does not mean that Indigenous peoples did not have landownership practices that varied greatly from Indigneous nation to nation.

What I think you mean here is landownership in a liberal system (ie the one that we live in) where there is a state that protects land title held as private property tied to an "economy." Taking the example of Britain, before the 1800's (roughly speaking) land was used in a system of "customary rights" that generally organised social structures. Here you have large landed elites who owned the land and generally ran the government. There is an extensive literature in British history about the turn to "enclosure" in the late 18th century as one of the markers of the rise of the modern nation state- where "common lands" that everyone could use (ie, some forests could be hunted in, you could "glean" left over crops, etc) were converted to "private property," and this had to do with the rise of what is generally known as a liberal system of governance. Hand in hand with this move to enclosure was the gradual breaking up of these massive estates of the landed elite into individually held pieces of private property. EP Thompson has a few classic works that document this change to a liberal system, like Whigs and Hunters and even "The Making of the English Working Class*.

At first in the North American colonies the British government (generally speaking) granted huge tracts of land to elites or monopolies with the idea that this was the best way to organise society. However, this land system reformed around the 1830s, and there were many reform projects in the colonies to create private property, most notably with settler-colonialism. Of course, these land use practices greatly conflicted with Indigenous land use practices, for example in Mi'kma'ki, that is most of the East coast of Canada, colonial land use like the making of provincial borders and the privatisation of fishing, logging, etc the Seven Mi'kmaq districts of Mi'kma'ki were disrupted and flow between the districts was restricted (however, Mi'kmaq peoples did and still do fight for their traditional land use practices). Perhaps a pertinent example of this is the way Haudenosaunee land now crosses the two nation state borders of the US and Canada, and their rights to their land practices are famously held up by Jay's Treaty of 1794/5. Audra Simpson has a fantastic book Mohawk Interruptus by Duke U Press that documents this land use and the way liberal states and private property regimes are resisted by Indigneous peoples.

You might also want to bounce this one off r/AskAnthropology, since they might be able to provide some perspectives that don't really show up as neatly in the historical record.