Next week at the Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia, the MLA Delegate Assembly will be voting on a resolution that condemns the University of Colorado at Boulder for violating the free speech rights of Ward Churchill and demands that Colorado reinstate Churchill to his position as a tenured professor in Ethnic Studies at the university.

Graham Hingangaroa Smith was in Australia recently and gave an interesting interview to the Australian Broadcast Corporation. The transcript follows... (thanks to Vicki Grieves for passing this along)

The NAISA Council met this weekend at the site of our 2010 meeting in Tucson. Wow, what a spectacular place!

Attached are some pictures of the Council at work and during a break poolside.

Robert Warrior
NAISA President, 2009-10

Yesterday 27 people gathered at the University of Auckland for a symposium, 'Teaching Pacific Literature,' organised by Selina Tusitala Marsh and myself in response to what we understand as a 'crisis' in the teaching of Pacific Lit.

The first four NAISA meetings have taken place in early May (Norman), early April (Athens), and later in May after most of us in North America are done with our terms (Minneapolis and Tucson).

Do NAISA members have thoughts about the ideal timing for our annual meetings?

Please comment...

From all accounts, our online submission system worked OK in spite of the paces we put it through in the frenzy to get proposals for the 2010 meeting in. Tsianina Lomawaima left the site open for over a day past the deadline to accommodate some of the people who were having trouble submitting.

Every time I watch submissions come in for the NAISA meeting it's truly humbling. When the steering committee first talked about what success would mean in this effort, we hoped that 75 people would come to the first meeting. Instead, we had 228 people on the program in over 50 sessions. In Georgia, where we founded NAISA, we had nearly 100 sessions. In Minnesota, at our first annual meeting as an incorporated group, we had over 120 sessions. This year, we'll have even more thanks to the hard work of NAISA members and supporters. Clearly, NAISA is an idea whose time has come.

Everyone on the NAISA membership list from 2009 has a user account for this website. Those who joined after October, 2010 need to follow a couple of different steps that are outlined below.

2009 members: click log in at the top right side of this page and request a new password using the same email address you used to sign up for membership. Click read more for further instructions on activating your account.

2010 and later members: You'll need to click on the log in link at the top of this page, then click the create new account tab and sign up for a user account using the email you used to sign up for membership. You'll get an automatic email message from this website and your user account will automatically become associated with your membership record.

(Also click read more if you need help remembering your user name or need a new password)

NAISA member Kim Tallbear has written a thoughtful op-ed about the US Thanksgiving holiday. Audra Simpson, another NAISA member, has already commented. Here's the link:

http://www.dailycal.org/article/107640/remembering_native_americans

UPDATE December 1: There are reports of the online submission system being slow due to the amount of NAISA traffic. Stick with it and it should work. If you are having problems, we will work with you to make sure your submission makes it to the review process. RW

NAISA's Council and the Tucson Host Committee are looking forward to what, after three years of meetings, we've come to expect--lots of submissions during the last week of the submission window. Between now and next Tuesday, December 1, hundreds of people will be logging on to the meeting website to upload proposals.

Click read more for some tips, suggestions, and other thoughts.