NAISA is looking for volunteers to help out with some upcoming initiatives, including a bibliography project, a website/technical committee, and an effort through which we hope to find ways to involve graduate students in the work and development of the association. Interested? Keep reading!

These initiatives are ones the NAISA Council hopes will allow us to tap into the tremendous talent and good will of the association's membership. We hope to lay some groundwork on each of these between now and May in hopes of having some face-to-face meeting time at the Tucson meeting.

If you want to participate, please send a message to rwarrior@illinois.edu and I'll put you in touch with the Council members who are working on what you are interested in.

The bibliography project, I hope, will allow us to develop a taxonomically flexible database of the scholarly and other materials that make up the work of Native American and Indigenous studies. Using various bibliographic technologies, I hope we can create a rich discourse around issues of what we include in the bibliography of our field and how to most effectively organize it.

Through a website/technical committee, we hope to find both technological expertise and creative ability to help sustain the infrastructure of this website and the functions it serves. If you are knowledgeable about Drupal, CiviCRM, or programming more generally; or, if you are interested in taking part in the public work of the NAISA blog, let me know.

A remarkable number of NAISA members are graduate students, and the future health of Native and Indigenous studies depends on the quality of graduate education in our field. Members of both the NAISA Council and the NAISA Nominations Committee have wanted to make sure that our efforts as an association reflect the needs and talents of our graduate student colleagues. This effort will almost certainly help shape the future of the association's work on graduate education. Let me know if you'd like to take part.

Please comment with questions or ideas.

Thanks!
Robert