American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Urbanization is an extremely important concept because virtually all European writers imagine that civilization arises only with cities and, indeed, the very word civilization is derived from the Latin civitat and civitas, citizenship, state, and, in particular, the city of Rome, which in turn is from civis, a citizen. The word city as well as Castellano ciudad is derived similarly. A people without cities or urban centers will ordinarily not be viewed as being “civilized” by Eurocentric writers, and, the dualistic split between “nature” and “culture” in much of Eurocentric thinking is also a “country” versus “city” split as I discuss in another article. Most European writers picture Native Americans as peoples living in the countryside, in jungles, forests, the plains/pampas, or in small villages surrounded by mountains as in the Andes. Naturally then it becomes problematic for them when they discover that huge numbers of First Nations peoples reside today in cities such as Buenos Aires, Lima, La Paz, Quito, Guatemala City, Mexico City, Toronto, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, and so on. What many non-Native writers do not realize is that the First Americans have, in fact, gone through periods of de-urbanization and re-urbanization on various occasions in their history and that urban life has long been a major aspect of American life from ancient times.