In the author's presentation at the gathering and celebration of forty years of the American Indian Studies Center, she focused on emerging, positive trends and developments in Native American/American Indian/indigenous studies (NAS) and on areas to move toward as educators expand the field in order to make it more current and relevant to the lived experiences of Native Americans today. In this short essay, the author summarizes these trends and encourages further exploration and development of other themes in the unfolding field of NAS. She offers these observations as an Anishinaabe/Metis woman who has served as a professor of American Indian studies in California for eight years and as the executive director of a Native American indigenous rights nonprofit organization for seventeen years. (Contains 12 notes.)