Small began her career with the California Indian Legal Services doing fishing rights and Indian religious freedom work. She was an adjunct professor at Humboldt State University, teaching undergraduate courses in the Native American Careers in Natural Resources Program (NACINR), including Natural Resource Law, Federal Indian Law, and Water Resource Law.

Small believes that her family and homeland have always nourished and strengthened her. She has had a pivotal role in the protection of the Cheyenne homeland. She returned to Montana and the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in 1984 as part of a team of Cheyenne leaders that helped form Native Action. Despite the colonial-induced legacy of immense poverty and continued high rates of unemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, violence, school dropouts, apathy, and a sense of powerless, Small has championed her people’s rights to education, health, and prosperity on the reservation in the face of these challenges. Small has taught her students, Native and non-native, about mining in a historical and present context. She teaches how Native environmentalists always work to prevent reservations from becoming national sacrifice areas.

Her career is dedicated to advancing the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. She serves the Cheyenne people in many leadership roles. Small holds an elected representatitive position from the Lame Deer District on the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council. She is on the elected Board Chair of Chief Dull Knife College—twelve years on the Northern Cheyenne Natural Resource Committee. For six years, Small served on the Northern Cheyenne Coal Bed Methane Committee. She was on the Northern Cheyenne Water Rights Negotiating Committee for ten years. Small was a member of the Northern Cheyenne Law and Justice Commission and the Northern Cheyenne Constitutional Revision Commission for four years. 

Small founded one of the first non-profit organizations established on an Indian reservation, Native Action, in 1990 and served as its Executive Director for over twenty years. Through research, writing, and negotiations, she successfully achieved numerous national precedents for tribal sovereignty, banking discrimination, Indian voting rights, Indian education, and environmental protection. From 1994 to 1997, Small was a member of the W.K. Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship.  In 1995, Small was named the 1995 Gloria Steinem Woman of Vision, Ms. Magazine. In 1997, she received the Jeanette Rankin Award from the Territory Resource Federation in Seattle. From 2001 to 2003, Small was a Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Fellow.

Small’s expansive career includes teaching at public and private schools on the Reservation and in tribal colleges and universities, including the Chief Dull Knife College and Little Bighorn College. In 2012, she was the EcoTrust Awardee from the Indigenous Leadership Award in Portland, Oregon. In 2014, Small won the Native Action Women’s Leadership Award. In 2015, she was the Leopold Leadership Fellow with Stanford University Woods Institute for the Environment and was a Designated Expert on Traditional Ecological Knowledge Representing the United States to Advise the Commission for Trilateral Environmental Cooperation and the Joint Public Advisory Committee in Montreal, Canada. These leadership fellowships allowed her to travel and lecture internationally.

She is the mother of four and grandmother of a growing herd of young Tsistsistas and Suhtaio Nation members. Small demonstrates contemporary Indigenous leadership and responsibility as a citizen leader.