The graduate students of the American Studies, African American Studies and History Departments at Yale University invite submissions for the upcoming conference- Pathways: A Graduate Conference on American Indian Studies to be held April 23-25, 2004. The purposes of this conference are: to provide a comfortable forum for graduate students working within some aspect of American Indian Studies (AIS) to share their work with one another, to foster student-to-student and student-to-professional relationships by encouraging networking and community-building for those working within AIS, to educate graduate students working in AIS about the process of professionalization through traditional and alternate career paths at colleges, universities, libraries, museums, tribal/national institutions, and non-profit organizations, to collaborate with undergraduates and members of local communities on issues pertinent to American Indian people and AIS, and to discuss, assess, and actively shape the future of AIS as a field. We are very pleased to announce that Devon Mihesuah (Choctaw), noted historian and professor of Applied Indigenous Studies at Northern Arizona University, will be our keynote speaker. Professor Mihesuah is the editor of American Indian Quarterly, and has authored and edited numerous books, including Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909 (1993), Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians (1998), Indigenous North American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism (2003), and Indigenizing the Academy: Native Scholars and Scholarship on Natives (forthcoming sequel to Natives and Academics).

Graduate student papers are invited on any topic within American Indian Studies from any disciplinary approach. Preference will be given to explicitly interdisciplinary work. We are especially desirous of papers that demonstrate and discuss emergent approaches in AIS, and/or those that demonstrate an active involvement with American Indian communities. In order to foster a regionally diverse community of graduate student presenters, travel expenses will be paid for students whose papers are selected.

Abstracts of 500 words should be mailed by October 15, 2003 to the address below. E-mail by attachment or in the body of the message to the address below.

Pathways is sponsored by The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library- Western Americana Collection, The Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University, The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and The Association of Native Americans at Yale.