Indian Boarding Schools with Marsha Small

The Extreme History Project: The Dirt on the Past

Join us as we talk with Marsha Small about her work to locate and document Indian boarding school cemeteries. Marsha leads the Indigenous Peoples' Day Montana movement and her work with the preservation and conservation of sacred sites and places using GPR, GPS, and GIS, specifically in boarding school cemeteries is internationally known. Marsha uses ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves, including at the Chemawa Indian School cemetery in Salem, Oregon. Marsha has a master’s degree in Native American Studies from Montana State University and is currently working on a PhD. Marsha was the distinguished visiting Native American Studies professor in Anthropology at Willamette University in 2019. We discuss Marsha's work at the Chemawa Indian Boarding School cemetery, along with the work she has been doing to establish protocols to document boarding school cemeteries. This is hard history and very difficult to discuss. Our thanks to Marsha for her continued dedication to this work and her mission to locate and document the graves of these children. To follow Marsha on social media use #aVoicefortheChildrenInIndianBoardingSchoolCemeteries.