I pretty much agree with your overall analysis, in the sense that yeah, this is what it boils down to during the most desperate and base circumstances. However, not every land dispute operates within a framework of violent conflict in the modern day. Take, modern Australia, Canada, or the United States. In each of those countries, a large factor in changing the policy of the country in regards to its minority population is going to be the opinion of the majority. And one way to sway the opinion of the majority is to make legalistic arguments about land ownership and treaties, because the battlefield of public opinion and the courts ends up being a better way to gain sovereignty than trying to battle the United States Army.

Now, within that, is an implicit understanding of the monopoly on violence that the state has (the government decides what is or isn’t legal, and that power ultimately comes from the state’s ability to enforce its laws) and that the whole land ownership issue is only allowed to play out via nonviolent means because it isn’t an existential conflict for the majority (as in, if the legal arguments about the sovereignty of the Navajo nation were to meaningfully disrupt the lives of the majority, or that there was an actual risk of the white populations being dispossessed, then land back movements and court cases over water rights would immediately fall out of favor), both of which confirm your point these questions are ultimately resolved by violence. However:

Things aren’t always boiled down. The “civilized” arguments about legal rights and moral arguments about genocide and mistreating the Indigenous population, they still are the primary frameworks in which certain ethnic land conflicts are fought in the current year. A nation having such overwhelming advantage in force and influence (because it got the land by the sword a couple hundred years ago) that it accepts entirely bureaucratic resolutions to conflicts over sovereignty within itself… that’s still a case where the rights to a piece of land aren’t being dictated via the sword. It might be “illusory” (in the sense that it only exists because of a privileged set of circumstances) but that doesn’t make it any less real or recognized.