The Urban Tradition Among Native Americans

Abstract

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. 1 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 Jack Forbes is the author of Columbus and Other Cannibals; Africans and Other Americans; Apache, Navajo and Spaniard and many other books and articles.He has been interested in the interface of archeology and indigenous history since he wrote on the prehistory of Siberia in The Masterkey in 1959.15

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.