SXSW 2025: Remaining Native Runs Toward Remembrance

In documentary and narrative filmmaking, there has recently been a reckoning with the United States and Canada’s long, brutal history with Indigenous people and residential/boarding schools. Hulu’s true crime series, Under the Bridge, featured Lily Gladstone portraying a police officer who learns that she’s connected to these schools.  Just last week, Sugarcane, a documentary about a Canadian residential school, was featured at the 97th Academy Awards ceremony in the Best Documentary category. Now, with its world premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, Remaining Native continues the fight to share the stories of those still living with the tangible impacts caused by the violent removal of young, Native children from their home and culture.

Ku Stevens is seventeen years old and, like most kids his age, dreams of the life he could live beyond his hometown. Is there any young person who doesn’t dream of trying their luck in a city far away from home? While others may dream of fleeing to New York or Los Angeles, Ku has his sights set on TrackTown, U.S.A., a nickname for Eugene, Oregon. It’s the home ofd the University of Oregon, which captured Ku’s heart when he was a kid. The school is known for its track program, and Ku strives to become a Duck. He’s easily winning races in his small town in Northwest Nevada, and he wants to know if he has what it takes to run with the best in the country.

That synopsis, on its surface, appears to have very little to do with the reality of boarding schools. Remaining Native first appears to be a sports documentary about a young person with dreams pushing his body to the limit to see what he can achieve. But that’s only part of Ku’s story. When he runs, he feels connected to the nature around him and his ancestors who came before him. One ancestor in particular connects Ku to the sport of running. That’s his great-grandfather Frank, one of the young Native kids who was forcibly taken from his home and sent to a boarding school. On three separate occasions Frank escaped, running fifty miles through the unforgiving Nevada desert to freedom. As Ku runs toward Oregon, he plans a remembrance run of those fifty miles his great-grandfather ran decades ago.

It’s difficult to balance acknowledging the trauma of past generations and looking toward the future. It’s important to understand the horrors that people suffered, but there’s no way to change it. For hundreds of years, the United States actively stripped Native kids of their identities through federal and church-run boarding schools. That heaviness will forever weigh on the descendants of those who lived through that brutality. The balance comes from taking that pain and turning it into something that betters those who come next. When Ku runs those fifty miles, he’s taking on the weight of his great-grandfather, sharing in those footsteps. Ku says he wants “to hurt for [Frank].” Anger and hurt can rot away at someone’s hope, but they can also fuel lasting change and remembrance to ensure we don’t return to our darkest paths.

To reduce Remaining Native to only Ku’s efforts in planning this fifty-mile run would be to lose his internal struggle of leaving home for the first time. How can he deeply love the place that he came from and also desperately want to leave it? It’s a question people grapple with every single day. If we leave the place where we learned of our culture and our identity, how do we grow those parts of ourselves with the support of our community? It takes strength to leave, but it also takes strength to decide to return and acknowledge that maybe the best way to make lasting change is to go back to where it all began.

The final shot of Remaining Native is of Ku running. By now, the audience has seen him run for much of the movie, but this last moment is different. The camera gives us a close-up of Ku’s shoe. It’s a Nike running shoe with an orange Swoosh, the color commonly associated with Indigenous cultures. Scrawled on the Swoosh are two small words: “For Frank.” Every mile, from the Yerington Paiute reservation in Northwest Nevada to TrackTown, U.S.A., is on the back of the miles Frank already ran. “They wanted us gone,” Ku states in a voiceover. Remaining Native celebrates the power of staying, running, and coming back for more.