Named after the Chemawa band of the Kalapuya people of the Willamette Valley, it opened on February 25, 1880[5] as an elementary school.

[6] In contrast to earlier belief that Native Americans were inherently "uncivilizable," Pratt argued for immersive education as a mechanism to assimilate and integrate the various pre-Columbian peoples into modern society.

Schools established under Pratt's influence were deliberately located far from Indian reservations as a means of isolating students from traditional cultural folkways.

[6] With Indian affairs part of the bailiwick of the War Department, US Army Lieutenant Melville Wilkinson, secretary to General Oliver Otis Howard, was tapped to lead the project.

[6] Curriculum was determined by gender, with boys taught painting, baking, drafting, machining, masonry, blacksmithing, shoemaking, and carpentry — artisan skills considered important for successful rural life.

[8] Owing to poor drainage, an inadequate inventory of land for agricultural education, and spurred by the 1884 destruction by fire of the girls' dormitory, officials began to investigate an alternative site for the school elsewhere in Oregon's Willamette Valley.

[6] The Salem site was selected owing to its proximity to state government and the location's favorable inventory of land.

Students could participate in sports of basketball, baseball, and football, competing against Anglo high schools and colleges of the region.

[6] Interested journalists and Oregon's delegation to the U.S. Congress lobbied with the US Bureau of Indian Affairs to keep it open, and it continued with 300 students.

During my time, efforts to teach the white way were still in force, but attempts to abolish or restrain Indian culture were past.

[1] In 2005, Chemawa Indian School formed a partnership with Willamette University, a private liberal arts college in Salem.

Operations at the Chemawa Indian School were investigated following the death in December 2003 of a 16-year-old student from Warm Springs, Oregon.

[20][8] Children at such boarding schools often suffered from epidemics in the dormitories of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis (incurable in the early 20th century), influenza and trachoma.

[8] No longer used for student burials after 1940, the cemetery was razed in 1960, with an incomplete set of grave markers later replaced based on school records.

[21] She is concerned with raising awareness in general about the graves, but also with protecting the cemetery from potential damage from a freeway interchange planned nearby.