Paige Bethmann’s debut documentary follows 17-year-old Paiute runner Kutoven Stevens as he chases a scholarship and honors his great-grandfather’s legacy of survival from the Stewart Indian School
Gathered inside the longhouse of the Hibulb Cultural Center on May 16, families snuggled up next to one another on the cedar seating along each side and sat in chairs in rows along the middle in silence as “Remaining Native,” the directorial debut of Paige Bethmann, Haudenosaunee, during a screening of the film at the Seattle International Film Festival.
When the film was over every person in the longhouse stood and the silence was broken with loud clapping and cheering for the film that follows Kutoven Stevens, a 17-year-old Yerington Paiute cross country runner determined to earn a University of Oregon scholarship in track as a track team of one from his school and with no coach.
The film is a coming of age story of a young athlete. It’s also a story about ancestral healing. When Stevens runs he thinks of his great-grandfather, Frank Quinn. Stevens runs the same land in rural Nevada that Quinn did at just 8 years old fleeing the brutality of the Stewart Indian School. The story of Quinn’s three escapes from the boarding school and the 50 mile journey from the boarding school back to his people on the Yerington Paiute Reservation are a powerful embodiment of the Paiute connection to their ancestral lands and a unique look at how the legacy of boarding schools still impacts Indigenous youth today.
Shared histories remembered
On the evening of the screening a cool breeze whispers through the trees of the 50-acre natural history preserve that surrounds the building, carrying the scent of earth, moss, and salt air from nearby Tulalip Bay as attendees enter the Hibulb Cultural Center. Canoe Hall welcomes viewers first — flanked by canoes — the soft sound of Lushootseed language greeting people in snippets — spoken, sung, carved into wood and echoed through video displays. The floor beneath mimics the flow of the Snohomish River, winding through exhibits that chronicle the retreat of ancient glaciers, the ancient land bridge migrations, whaling traditions; this is a powerful place to address the enduring pain of the boarding school era.
Moving deeper into the cultural center, the hallway narrows to the Longhouse with wooden platforms lining the walls. In this sacred space, where voices of Tulalip storytellers often fill the room, Joey Clift, Cowlitz Indian Tribe, the Emmy nominated television writer and producer, screened his new short film “Pow!” along with Bethmann’s “Remaining Native.”
In Underscore + ICT’s interview with Clift, he reflected on how meaningful it was that, despite one being a short comedic animated film and the other a documentary, both works addressed the history of boarding schools in distinct and powerful ways.
“This history affects all of us, generations across,” Bethmann said after the screening. “The survivors, their children, their children’s children. How are we handling that today? How are we coming together and trying to continue our culture and continuing these conversations? I thought Ku did a really amazing thing by bringing people together through running.”
“Imagine you’re 8”
The film introduces you to the land, with beautiful shots of the early morning desert sky and sagebrush, the sounds of birds and bugs chirping. Then the crunch of Stevens running shoes as they hit the dirt road. Stevens begins his narration with what he thinks about when he’s running.
“I imagine running… for my life,” Stevens said in the film.
The film then draws the viewer into Stevens’ journey of self discovery through his great grandfather Quinn’s journey home.
In the film Stevens says, “Imagine you’re 8” as he talks about Quinn being taken from his family, and making the choice to run away He asks the viewer to imagine being an8 year-old, escaping abuse and running 50 miles in the desert alone back to your family.
“It’s hard in general to run 50 miles in weather that’s really hot, and the elevation is really steep but then to put yourself in the perspective of a child who had to do that, I think it allows yourself to really ask yourself that same question of, imagine you’re eight,” Bethmann said. “I think speaking in the second person really asks something from the audience to be able to put themselves in that perspective as well… It really forces you to try to take on that experience yourself.”
Ancestral responsibility
“Remaining Native” came to fruition from both Stevens and Bethmann’s feelings of responsibility and compassion for their ancestors. Bethmann was working in New York City at Vox Media when she read a story about Stevens wanting to retrace his great grandfather’s 50 mile escape from Stewart Indian School in a Remembrance Run after news in 2021 of at least 200 unmarked graves of children who were taken to the very same boarding school. This all prompted Bethmann to ask herself, “What is my responsibility to my family?”
“As a filmmaker and someone who worked in media, I thought storytelling was the way that I can honor that story the best,” Bethmann continued.
Although the film starts as an inspirational sports film, Stevens’ story as an athlete is anchored to his great-grandfather’s 50-mile escape from the boarding school. Bethmann understood that approaching storytelling and sharing about the terror of boarding schools is a lot of responsibility and was going to need intentional filmmaking so she reached out to the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition before she began filming. The NABSHC was started in 2011 by leaders from the U.S. and Canada “to develop and implement a national strategy that increases public awareness and cultivates healing for the profound trauma experienced by individuals, families, communities, American Indian and Alaska Native Nations resulting from the U.S. adoption and implementation of the Boarding School Policy of 1869.”
“They’re the people who are doing this work on the front lines, creating and making space for elders to share their stories and creating resources to help people navigate the trauma” Bethmann said.
Bethmann didn’t want to make the film unless the NABSHC thought it was going to be useful, or help uplift the work that they do. She also asked them what resources they could provide the film team so that filming was done in a safe and responsible way.
“Ku’s father, also, he held ceremony for us during our time there,” Bethmann said. “We had non Native people on our team who would do a lot of the labor of going through the archival material and being able to label it and organize it so that I wasn’t in that really heavy material for so long that it started to cause me any pain or triggers. It still did but I think it’s learning how to take space and going back to your roots of what medicines help you. What spaces can we all talk about? And I even acknowledge that this is hard. And I think just being in Nevada and living there and having conversations with elders all the time always kind of brought me back to the north star of why I was making the film.”
Family bonds
Bethmann made the decision to move from New York to Nevada to be closer with the Stevens’ and to understand the land they come from. They quickly became like family over the four years Bethmann lived in Nevada. She went berry picking, pine nut picking, onion foraging, and even joined the family at a demolition derby.
“My favorite memories are, a lot of it is when I wasn’t filming. It’s going over to their house and going pine nut picking with them. I’m pretty sure I have pine pitch still in my hair,” Bethmann joked.
“Delmar is such a caretaker, and he’s a hunter, and so he was, he’s always feeding me,” Bethmann said about Delmar Stevens, Kutoven Stevens’ father. “He’s always trying to give everyone his goose jerky. I think those memories that feel like family are the most resonant for me, and they are my family.”
The Stevens family even attended Bethmann’s wedding in May.
“It feels really good and supportive,” Bethmann said. “Ku is like my little brother. He’s someone who comes over and crashes on my couch and eats the food in my fridge and tells me about his girl problems. Those memories will always stay with [me] though .”
Bethmann’s bond with the family and the care she took to getting to know each of them and their stories, extended to the land they come from as well.
As a Haudenosaunee woman who grew up in Haudenosaunee territories Bethmann grew up learning about maple syrup, strawberries, and stories of Sky Woman, stories that are from a specific place. So, when it came to the landscape in Nevada, and filming Stevens running the same land his great-grandfather did, she wanted to take the time to understand the different textures and to hear the stories of the land.
“Those stories and those details, they mean a lot, and also it allows the creativity of the film to come through with things like dust, with heat, being able to look at the different textures of the land,” Bethmann said. “I want to make sure that the film is a reflection of the community that has known this place for forever. I think the land being the vessel that opens up the story and ties back to our histories became such a good medium in the film to be able to explore the memories deeper.”
Youth perspective
Bethmann’s original intent was to film Stevens’ Remembrance Run, but after spending time in Yerington, Nevada with Stevens and his family she decided to move there and begin a larger film.
“When we got out there, just seeing who [he] was as a young person, but also as an athlete that was really determined to achieve this goal of running at a d1 school and seeing that he didn’t have the resources, or coach, or a team, but had this fierce ambition, I was really curious to explore, ‘How does this community, reckoning with this news, influence the way that he’s training, influence his intention as a runner,?’ and how that developed over the course of time,” Bethmann said. “Because being a young person, we don’t really get spaces to talk about how the boarding schools affect us, even generations removed from the history. I think seeing a young person navigate that is really powerful.”
Bethmann believes that talking about the effects of boarding schools through the lens of a young Native person living in a modern world is an important narrative layer in continued efforts against assimilation.
“Things that come up for us as young adults and living in a modern world where practicing your culture isn’t always available you have to make a concerted effort to be Native,” Bethmann said. “Otherwise it’s assimilation that’s going to take over.”
This is something that was instilled in her from a young age from her grandmother – that being Native is an act of being and to remember that every day.
“My grandmother was someone who was such a force, and was someone who was always reminding me and my brother and my family to be proud of who you are,” Bethmann said. “Participate in community events, show up, never lose sight of your identity.”
For non-Natives learning about the history of the boarding school era is a fairly recent development. A survey of 27 states where many federally recognized tribes live found that only 11 required public schools to teach about Native peoples in at least some grade levels.
In Washington, a 2005 free curriculum called Since Time Immemorial was introduced but wasn’t used until it became required a decade later. Even with the requirement many schools still don’t use it. Oregon passed a bill in 2017 requiring lessons on Native history and culture, about Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes but this has also been slow to implement.
Bethmann hopes that her film could help facilitate these important conversations in education into a curriculum that resonates with Native youth instead of the usual efforts to teach non-Natives with no knowledge of Native peoples and history.
“Oftentimes the boarding school history isn’t taught in schools, but also, I feel like what’s missing is it’s not taught in a way that can resonate with Native people,” Bethmann said. “A lot of us know this history. They know the pain of these stories, the horror, but maybe they don’t know how it applies to their daily lives as young adults. And so how do we develop a curriculum that’s not just centered around non Native people learning and understanding the history, but for Native kids who maybe are reflecting back on their own relationships with their relatives or family members who went through [boarding schools]?”
Across the country there are cultural revitalization programs for language and traditional arts as a way of combating the long federal legacy of forced assimilation. Bethmann believes curriculum like what she hopes to create with her “Remaining Native” footage, scenes with elders, boarding school survivors and other footage that never made the final cut of the film, could be an innovative tool that builds on those efforts and developed into ancillary content to help guide a curriculum or to open up a conversation that Native youth would engage with.
Native youth are who Bethmann thinks of first when she thinks of the film.
“Kids who are young and they’re ready to be our next generation of leaders that we need so desperately,” Bethmann said.
“I hope it allows young people to search within themselves as [to] what they can do,” Bethmann continued. “It doesn’t have to be running, it doesn’t have to be making a film, but maybe it’s just having a conversation with family members and knowing that this history — you don’t have to detach yourself from it. It is painful and it is heavy, but it can also propel you forward and it can remind you and be that guiding star when you’re feeling stuck.”
Story will live on forever
For people who have their own familial and cultural ties to boarding school there is an added layer of meaning. This was true for a Lakota elder and boarding school survivor who attended the SIFF screening at the Hibulb Cultural Center. After the films, in a voice trembling with emotion, he thanked Bethmann and Stevens for continuing to raise awareness and share their own stories. He then bravely recounted his own lived experience at a boarding school.
Another audience member started a discussion on global Indigenous solidarity against continued colonial oppression.
For everyone else, Bethmann says that the film is still wonderful storytelling and can be enjoyed by everyone.
At the world premiere of the film at SXSW in March it received the Documentary Feature Audience Award and the Documentary Feature Special Jury Award. After the festival circuit Bethmann hopes the film is purchased for wider distribution but she’s not worried; she knows the story will live on forever. For now, Bethmann and “Remaining Native” are on the film festival circuit.
Editor’s Note: Jarrette Werk, Underscore Native News/Report for America, is an associate producer for “Remaining Native.”
Originally published on Underscore Native News.
