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Aanii / Boozhoo / Osiyo / Halito / Yá’át’ééh / Greetings!

Welcome to the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures (ASAIL). Founded in 1972, ASAIL is a professional academic organization created to promote the study and teaching of Indigenous written, oral, and visual literary traditions. We hope that the resources on this site, which include syllabi, academic program listings, and conference information, can help expand knowledge about the innovative scholarship and powerful Indigenous creative productions that form the basis of the field.

ASAIL’s current membership includes leading scholars, creatives, and activists committed to the interdisciplinary study and continuance of Native American and Indigenous languages, cultures, and aesthetic traditions. Membership includes access to the ASAIL listerv and a subscription to our fabulous journal, SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures. We would love you to join us!

First created at the Modern Language Association conference, ASAIL moved its meetings to the Native American Literary Symposium (NALS) in the early 2000s. An Indigenous-run conference held on Indigenous Nation land, NALS was a rich source of inspiration and community for many years. Since 2020, when NALS went on hiatus, ASAIL began to host virtual conferences that enabled broad access and participation. We are proud to extend that tradition and each year we continue to have lively scholarly exchanges, presentations, readings, and film showings that highlight Indigenous creative and intellectual production.

Importantly, graduate students are particularly valued by the organization. We take pride in our history of mentorship and consider relationality and capacity building to be one of the strengths of ASAIL. We offer several conference fellowships to offset expenses for graduate students presenting their research and have been able to support a number of gratis graduate student memberships as a result of generous donations. Please consider attending, and potentially submitting work to, the next ASAIL conference. 

Thank you for visiting. We look forward to being in conversation with you about the vibrant intellectual traditions that make up historical and contemporary Indigenous literatures.