Remaining Native: How Our Stories Are Our Medicine

YERINGTON, Nevada – I kept my eyes on the horizon, every breath a battle with suffocation.

It wasn’t the usual breathlessness that comes from trying to run (or walk) up mountain trails.

It was the air, so hot and dry that if I inhaled too deeply, it felt like it singed my lungs.

It was the sand, so cruel and relentless, I had to keep looking behind me to make sure I was actually making progress.

It was 17-year-old Kutoven Stevens, who was the reason I was shuffling through the heat and sand and sadness.

But maybe most of all, it was thinking about his great-grandfather – Frank “Togo” Stevens – that made something I normally didn’t even think about, feel like a Herculean feat.

“How could an 8-year-old do this?” I kept asking myself. “Wasn’t he scared of snakes? I wonder if he prayed? I wonder how much he cried? I wonder if it was thinking about his parents that kept him moving through fear and rivers and sand.”

Rememberance Run: The Beginning

It was May of 2021 when Ku Stevens heard a news story detailing how hundreds of children had been found in unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada. The story shocked the world and became the catalyst for local, national and journalistic investigations in Canada and the U.S.

And while the world grappled with the abuse, neglect and murder suffered by thousands of children stolen from their families by government and religious leaders who wanted to erase their culture by sending them to hundreds of boarding schools across both countries. There were 526 known boarding schools in the U.S. – the largest of which was located in Brigham City, Utah.

Kutoven Stevens understood the shadow cast by schools meant to steal a child’s cultural identity because his great-grandfather – Frank “Togo” Stevens – was one of those stolen.

But the man he calls Togo was something else – a survivor.

He was also a runaway.

It took the man he calls Togo three tries, but at just 8-years-old, he successfully ran from the Stuart Indian School to his home on the Yerington Paiute Reservation in Nevada – 50 miles away.

So the grief he felt when he heard about the children in Canada who died at a school they never wanted to attend, didn’t belong to just him or his family. It belonged to a country that had never really reckoned with what happened to these children – and how it changed their families and communities.

Stevens is a distance runner for Washington State, who just won First Team All-Conference honors a couple of weeks ago. But in 2021 he was the only runner on his high school team fighting just to get a shot at competing in college. So when he discussed how he could honor those children who endured boarding schools, who were killed in boarding schools and how ran away from boarding schools, with his parents, running seemed like the perfect tribute.

It was, after all, what had saved his great-grandfather. And it was what fueled his hopes for a future that might take him beyond the boundaries of the reservation Togo was so desperate to return to.

The Stevens family organized the “Remembrance Run” in August of 2021.

I asked to join them, as did dozens of community members and strangers from across the country. Stevens made it clear that this wasn’t a protest and it wasn’t a race. It was a 50-mile celebration of these children.

Amy Donaldson on the first day of the Remembrance run

We’d run five miles at a time, making sure everyone made every cutoff, and camp in the mountains at the halfway point.

We’d run to remember the children who endured years at those schools and the children who, like Togo, managed to escape. And we’d run to honor those children who died in places they should never have had to live.

Remaining Native: Stories As Medicine

It was during this very first run that I met Paige Bethmann, a journalist and aspiring filmmaker, and the descendant of stolen children.

“I was working at Vox media… when the news came out in 2021 about the unmarked graves of Indigenous children in Kamloops, Canada,” she said. “I immediately thought of my great-grandmother, because my great-grandmother went to a boarding school… She was from the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation in upstate New York… I just remember hearing those stories from my grandmother and my family on how that affected our lives.”

While she saw a lot of pain and grief, she also realized how many people didn’t even know about this dark chapter of American and Canadian history.

“I started seeing this reaction from Indian Country of sharing stories, and just the hurt and the pain,” she said. “And then on the other side of it, I saw so many people be like, I didn’t know that happened… or, Oh, I thought that was just Canada… And so I was sort of looking for, how do I like, what do I do with this? What do I do with this time that we’re in now, as a storyteller?”

It was while she was contemplating that question that a friend sent her an article about Stevens’ plans for the “Remembrance Run.”

“And I thought, ‘Wow, like, here’s a 17-year-old kid with this awareness,” she said. “He knows what he should do.’”

Bethmann knew what she should do as well.

She showed up with a small crew, including her then-fiance, to tell the story of a teen trying to educate the world, while honoring his great-grandfather and all the children like him. What she discovered changed her life – and resulted in her first documentary film.

“Remaining Native” premiered last winter at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, to sold out audiences. The film won Feature Documentary Special Jury Award and Feature Documentary Audience Award. The film has earned dozens of other festival awards in the months since, and it screened for the first time in Utah on Nov. 5, as part of the American Indian Services’ Native American Heritage Month celebration.

Executive Director Chauma Kee-Jensen said the decision to show “Remaining Native” – and another film “Fire Tender” – is an effort to create “cultural awareness to our surrounding community and to also share native stories with natives and non-natives.”

The group tries to show films each year, and this year they wanted to share stories told by Native artists.

Kee Jansen said sharing these stories is more than entertainment.

“It offers a lot of history, wisdom…a lot of context to what kind of things native people had to endure,” she said. “Those things ripple down through generations, affecting their posterity. …It’s important that we let people know, we are still being affected by historical things that happened to us as native people, and things that are happening to us today, whatever it may be – legislative fights, environmental fights. These things are going to affect future generations.”

After that first run, Bethmann decided in order to tell the story, she needed to move to Reno.

“I wanted to be able to show up in a space even when I wasn’t filming… because I felt it was important to show … how do I show up for their community?” she explained. “It was a really great decision, because now we’re all like family.”

What began at that first run, quickly grew into a much more expansive and nuanced story.

“After going through that experience and learning about not only the story of his great grandfather, but really the story of this kid who was trying to… [go] to college for running when he comes from a place with no support, no coach, no anything, I felt like those things were intersecting at an interesting point,” she said. “It’s really about this kid who’s navigating this history while also trying to achieve something in his life right now.”

The film is both educational and a call to action.

The film’s premier in March of 2025 at SXSW Film Festival. Kutoven Stevens is center and the others, left to right: Lupe Cabada, HS running coach; Delmar Stevens, father, Kutoven Stevens, student athlete, Misty Stevens, mother, Paige Bethmann, director, Jessica Epstein, Producer.

“I’m not going to hold someone’s hand with this history,” she said. “I’m not going to explain it… The film has no talking heads telling you about the boarding schools. It’s really about communicating feeling and showing this kid and having people really follow his own journey and his experience.”

Bethmann hopes the movie will help audiences understand some things that are tough to put into words.

“If I can evoke emotion and feeling for an audience, whether or not they’re native or not, like that’s successful, because it’s about human to human understanding. And I think that’s what’s missing in our society right now is a lot of understanding and a lot of empathy.”

It is a story that revolves around a sport that’s not known for its popularity with spectators. But it is a critical connection in Stevens’ journey.

“When Ku was running on the land and training, he’s connecting with his grandfather’s story, because our stories are held by the land, and they’re found in the land,” she said.” It’s almost like tapping into ancestral muscle memory… What are you tapping into to get you to that finish line?”

Inherited Trauma, Community Healing

I ran with the Stevens family and their community for three years.

In 2023, we ended the run with a ceremony at the graveyard across the street from the Stuart Indian School. The graves, most without names, are the final resting place of children who never wanted to be students at the boarding school.

For 50 miles, I thought about Togo and sent him my gratitude. I prayed for those children who grew into adults who didn’t understand the trauma they carried in their hearts. And in the pocket of the pack I’d worn the entire run, I carried a dozen pouches of tobacco, a spiritual and medicinal offering I’d made with many of the others before we started the run.

The graveyard for children who died while living at and attending the Stuart Indian School in Nevada. This is where the run ended the last two years when we ran from the reservation to the school.

There was a prayer and some instructions before we made our way into the most barren graveyard I’ve ever seen. I didn’t try to stop the tears that rolled down my face as I kissed each pouch and whispered a prayer for a child I didn’t know and a family shattered by their loss.

When I got to the last grave, I thought about the gift this family gave to me by allowing me to run with them, to run for these children, to acknowledge their loss and to try and heal the aftermath of pain these schools caused.

And as I sat in the theater in Lehi, Utah, watching “Remaining Native” for the third time, tears fell again at the gift Bethmann has given us.

It is a story any parent can relate to, a story any dreamer will understand.

As one woman said, “Our stories are medicine.”

And that medicine both connects and cures us.

“I learned how powerful storytelling is,” Bethmann said, “the conversations I’ve had with people about this story has really moved people to consider our history, to consider us in a way that isn’t ‘Oh, like the reservation life,’ but like, what does it actually mean to be a Native American teenager… Or [just] a kid who happens to be dreaming about something, who happens to be native.”

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