SXSW Winner Paige Bethmann comes home to New York City

Ku Stevens in Remaining Native

Remaining Native is a coming-of-age documentary told from the perspective of Kutoven (Ku) Stevens, a 17-year-old Native American runner, struggling to navigate his dream of becoming a collegiate athlete as the memory of his great-grandfather's escape from an Indian boarding school begins to connect past, present, and future.

To make the film, director Paige Bethmann uprooted from her native New York to Nevada, spending over three years in Reno to document Ku’s journey into adulthood, but also embed herself with the community and the reality of life on the land.

After winning both the Audience and Special Jury Awards at SXSW, the film makes its New York Premiere tomorrow, Saturday May 3, at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, screening in the American Museum of Natural History.

The screening is accompanied by a community run, in partnership with Upper West Side Run Club, commencing from the steps of the museum, around Central Park and returning for a performance with Native dancers.

Paige and I discussed the significance of the iconic venue, returning to her home state, and what it took to tell an indigenous story with intention.

Paige Bethmann

Bella: Tell me about how you found Ku and what drew you to working on this story.

Paige: In 2021, I was working at Vox Media and that's where I had been a producer of documentary and nonfiction for almost six years. In May of that year, the news broke about Kamloops, Canada and the discovery of unmarked graves of Indigenous children which really opened up a lot of stories from both the communities, but also a suprised reaction from mainstream media that this had even occurred, based on a lot of people not understanding or knowing about this history.

I started remembering a lot of stories I grew up with about my great grandmother who attended a boarding school when she was a young girl, and the repercussions of that experience within my family, when a family friend sent me an article that was written by a local newspaper in Nevada, the Reno Gazette Journal.

The article was about Ku and his aspiration to run 50 miles across the desert to honor his great grandfather and also raise awareness about Indian boarding schools. I thought, here is this amazing visual opportunity to film someone doing such an incredible journey, but also here is a young person who has this awareness and this strength and bravery to want to honor his family's story, despite being two generations removed from it. This was a way to show that history in a modern context, to ask how do young people handle this history as they are entering these pivotal moments of their lives and how does it affect their families and the way that they go after their dreams?

I think through telling this story, it's really done a lot for me personally to understand more of my own family's story, as well as learning how I've been navigating the lasting impacts of Indian boarding schools in my own life.