Kayla Gahagan

While working at the Powell Tribune two decades ago, Kayla (Stewart) Gahagan’s reporting made the front page plenty of times.

But earlier this month, the 2001 Powell High School graduate’s byline appeared above the fold of a more prestigious publication: The New York Times.

It was an exciting moment for Gahagan, who now works as a freelancer — and homeschools two of her four children — from her home in Rapid City, South Dakota.

“It was a bucket list [item] to have a byline in The New York Times,” she said Wednesday. “And to be on the front page was definitely the icing on the cake for me.”

Although she’s contributed to several New York Times articles, Gahagan has yet to have one of her own story pitches greenlit by the Gray Lady, and “I didn’t think it [a byline] was ever going to happen.”

But in December, the Times reached out and asked her to cover a ceremony in Wounded Knee, South Dakota. There, as New York Times culture reporter Julia Jacobs and Gahagan write in the piece, “a small crowd gathered around a cluster of boxes that had been laid reverently atop two feet of snow. Inside were Lakota cultural objects and belongings that had been returned after more than a century on the other side of the country …”

The items were apparently taken in the wake of the infamous 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, in which U.S. soldiers killed perhaps 300 Lakota men, women and children. The possessions were then housed at a small museum in Massachusetts, before finally being returned to the Oglala Sioux Tribe last year. The Times article outlines that complicated history — and the challenges tribes face in deciding what to do with returned objects.

Gahagan turned in her portion of the article not long after the ceremony, for what she thought would be a relatively small story. However, as the article was repeatedly held and editors combed through it, Jacobs continued reporting and “it kept getting bigger and bigger,” Gahagan said; she heard rumblings that the piece might be a candidate for the front page. Ultimately, the two journalists’ work — and their names — graced the top section of Times’ Friday, March 17 edition, distributed to the paper’s some 310,000 weekday print subscribers. (The story also appears online at nyti.ms/3ZjkFRe.)

To her surprise, Gahagan was not listed as just a contributor, but as a bonafide coauthor.

Gahagan is no stranger to big publications, as her work has appeared in Wired, Midwest Living, the Denver Post and Reuters, among others. But in this season of life, Gahagan is doing less story pitching and “just trying to be ‘mom’ more and [putting] priorities in the right place,” she said.

“That’s kind of why I thought this [New York Times byline] is probably never gonna happen,” she said. “So I was thrilled when they reached out.”

Gahagan was recently named the editor of Black Hills Family Magazine and her first book, titled “Radical Joy,” is set to be released in June; she says it’s about Christian motherhood and her effort to “do motherhood with joy.”