American Indian students and professors from across the Midwest arrived this weekend in Lawrence for the start of a three-day conference at Kansas University.

“We’ve managed to bring quite a diverse group together,” said Cheryl Lester, an associate professor in American studies at KU.

The conference, called “Creating CommUNITIES,” began Saturday with tours of the Haskell Indian Nations University campus and the Cultural Center and Museum. Saturday’s events also included an Indian taco dinner and a concert featuring Lawrence singer and flute player Cornel Pewewardy and classical guitarist Gabriel Ayala.

Today and Monday the group will play host to a series of paper presentations and panel discussions on Indian culture, history and governance.

Coordinated by KU’s American studies department and Center for Indigenous Nations Studies and Haskell’s department of American Indian studies, the conference hopes to “get a dialogue going both regionally and nationally,” Lester said.

It’s also a planning session to next year’s conference, which will mark the 40th anniversary of KU’s American studies department’s publishing a collection of essays that later became “American Indians Today,” a respected American Indian studies textbook for more than 30 years.

Plans call for soliciting papers on topics covered in “American Indians Today” for publication in 2005.