Small completed a bachelor's degree in environmental science and policy at Southern Oregon in 2010 and discovered that she loved ecological fieldwork. Then she started a master's degree program in Native American studies at Montana State University, but she didn't know how to fuse her interests. That's when Robert Kentta, a friend and longtime cultural resources director with the Siletz Tribe in Oregon, offered Small a suggestion that pertained to an old Native boarding school in Salem: “Hey, why don't you go over there to Chemawa and get one of those machines that looks like a baby buggy—see how many kids they got in that cemetery? A lot of people have been wondering for years.”
For the first time in her life, a path opened up with ease, with what she took as nudges (“and sometimes shoves”) from her ancestors—a travel grant here, funding for lodging at a conference there. So she followed Kentta's advice. That summer, between the first and second years of her master's program, she reached out to the historic preservation office of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Members of the tribe counted relatives among those buried at Chemawa, and the tribe owned a brand-new ground-penetrating radar system. The preservation office proposed that Small conduct her survey of Chemawa as an internship: Small would get an institutional affiliation that might help smooth the way to accessing federal property and getting academic credit, and the tribe might finally get some answers.
Beginning in 1880, children were sent to Chemawa from dozens of tribes, sometimes from hundreds or thousands of miles away. The cemetery, which has been neglected for decades, is separated from the boarding school—still in operation today—by a set of railroad tracks. Over the years, Grand Ronde elders told stories about grave markers being removed and replaced, so it was no longer clear—if it had ever been—how many bodies were buried there.
When Small entered the cemetery for the first time in the summer of 2012, she burned sweetgrass—a plant with spiritual significance across Native cultures. “The sweetgrass brings the spirits in, wakes them up,” she said. She spent her first days walking through the rows, cross-referencing a list of burial plots with the names carved into each grave marker. One day at dusk, when she reached the fence at one end, she gazed to the horizon. The sun was setting, and Small's eyes followed the long shadows reaching back toward the school. All the graves, she noticed, were laid out according to Christian custom with their feet pointing east—blatant disregard for the multitude of burial practices and belief systems that different tribes hold around death.