Remaining Native: The Long Run
by Karenna Blomberg
I’m not sure if I could identify exactly why Remaining Native piqued my interest when looking through the SIFF 2025 lineup. Maybe it was because I have a recurring Olympics hyperfixation and it follows Olympic track and field hopeful Kutoven “Ku” Stevens in his journey to qualify for admission to an elite collegiate track team. Maybe it was because a documentary meant, in part, to address the nuances of the lives and culture of Native Americans today seemed to be an ambitious project to take on by a first-time feature director, Paige Bethmann, and I was curious to see how it was executed. But maybe it was just amazing luck, pure and simple. Because Remaining Native is the kind of film that will sit with you, shift your worldview, disquiet you, and make you laugh and give you hope time and time over in its tight 85-minute runtime.
Shot in 2022, the film follows Stevens, a high school upperclassman and a gifted athlete (one of only a few Native American athletes in his area) as he trains to get noticed by recruiters for the track and field program at his dream school, the University of Oregon. Stevens is a member of the Paiute Tribe in Yerington, Nevada (Director Bethmann is a Haudenosaunee Native herself.) and the film deftly demonstrates how his culture and family history is inseparably intertwined with his athletic aspirations.
Much of the first half of the film zeroes in on Stevens as he works with his trainer to be able to run a mile under nine minutes, an achievement referred to with the code word “sub-nine” throughout the film. We run with him on tracks, at meets, and through the beautiful yellows, greens, and tans of the Nevada desert. Beyond capturing his exceptional talent and athleticism, Bethmann is very good at showing how Stevens is an average teenage boy: a bit awkward, a bit easy to embarrass. Hyperfocused on his college goals, sometimes oblivious to anything but. However, in other moments, Stevens has a palpable gravity to him that makes him an excellent documentary subject. Even from the beginning of the film, you can feel the invisible weight he carries and begin to unravel the story behind it.
Frequently, a voiceover from Stevens encourages us to “imagine we are eight years old”—the age Stevens’ grandfather, Frank Quinn, was when he was kidnapped from his tribe and taken to a U.S. government-funded Indian boarding school, miles away from his home. These schools were generally used as a means to exert white control over Native Americans, with the goal of assimilating Native children into “American” Society, frequently using violent, abusive, and even deadly methods. Stevens’ grandfather managed to escape from the school, was caught and brought back, and then managed to escape again, traveling about 50 miles on foot to get back to his family. These voiceovers viscerally describe the desperation, anxiety, and pain that Quinn had to endure at only eight years old. That run is the reason why Stevens is able to run, and that knowledge adds a gravity to Stevens’ goals that extends beyond the breadth of glory and accomplishment.
After Stevens is accepted into college, the focus of the film changes somewhat as he makes the decision to put together a multi-day memorial run for his grandfather. The path retraces the approximate path he would have run when escaping from his captors, beginning from Yerington and ending at the now-closed school grounds in Carson City. While only Stevens and his father were going to complete the run, many others heard about it, and the small undertaking for charity became a notable event. What could be a cursory exploration of the life of a young athlete is brought into a new, sobering context with this shift, and I believe the film is better off for it. Ku is a star runner, and he’s a regular teen with oversized dreams he is not sure he will fit into. But just as important to understanding the stakes at hand is that he is burdened with a sense of maturity beyond his years. That maturity comes from the knowledge of how much his family suffered less than 100 years ago, and how much was lost that he will never be able to comprehend.
At the end of the trail, as the runners explore the place where the school once stood and the cemetery where so many of its victims were buried, we hear one of the more heartbreaking lines in recent documentary memory: “What kind of school has a cemetery?”
Remaining Native is an excellent documentary that seamlessly intertwines many topics into a single, potent narrative. It connects the typical “leaving the nest” narrative, a sports documentary, and a story of coming to terms with the deep, unhealed wounds of generational community trauma, all while bringing attention to the decades of horrors committed against Native American children. However, it does not drown itself in the trauma: Stevens’ history and culture are heavy, but they also are a crucial uplifting force. Bethmann’s direction doesn’t look heavy-handed, but it is still very conscious of the ways that Stevens strives to form his own identity and make his own path while holding onto his heritage and his family’s many struggles and sacrifices. They appear as a microcosm of the struggles of many young Native people, and the ease at which Bethmann appears to weave these complex thoughts together is truly awe-inspiring.