NOTE: This five-minute story includes accounts of violence against children.
In 1913, government officials ripped 8-year-old Yerington Paiute Tribe member Frank Quinn from his family and placed him in the Stewart Indian Boarding School near Carson City. They took him so that they could strip him of his language, spirituality and culture.
Quinn was one of tens of thousands of Native children taken to U.S. Federal Indian Boarding Schools beginning at the end of the 19th century. These schools were meant to indoctrinate children into white culture.
As part of her history PhD studies at UNLV, Annie Delgado researches what actually happened to Native children in the U.S. boarding school system. “The early years are just filled with trauma, abuse, pain, and just assimilation,” Delgado said. “It’s kind of hard to wrap your head around and fathom the types of, honestly, the types of evil that [were] happening in these boarding schools.”
The schools, she says, were essentially “internment camps,” where children were physically and sexually assaulted. Most concerning is that untold numbers of these children would go missing or be found murdered. Death was so common at boarding schools that cemeteries and unmarked graves are located near campuses.
Many students tried to escape the abuse; Quinn was one them. He fled twice, but both times he was found and taken back to the Stewart Indian Boarding School. On his third attempt, however, he traversed through the northern Nevada desert to get back home to his family in Yerington.
Ku Stevens, Quinn’s great-grandson, is the protagonist in the documentary, "Remaining Native." In the film, viewers learn, along with Stevens, the story of his great-grandfather. It explains why some children were able to escape and others weren’t.
To remember the courage of Native children who tried to escape, Stevens organized a remembrance run from Yerington to the Stewart Indian School in 2021. Three more annual races followed. The route marked the same 50-mile trek Quinn took to go back home to his family.
The run, split in two 25-mile days, demanded a lot from participants. “They were running, sweating and bleeding,” Stevens said. “I think of this guy Russell, who I consider just like an uncle, broke both his feet, fractured them by the end of the run. And he did all 50 miles.”
Many participants in the first run did not have the same running experience as Stevens, who was training at the time for a spot at the University of Oregon’s track and field team. “To see him put it all out there, it shows how it meant so much to him to put himself in the shoes of those kids that were stolen from our tribe,” Stevens said.
The documentary is currently on the film festival circuit. It premiered in March, showing in more than 55 screenings across the U.S. and Canada. The film has been very well-received, according to the director, Paige Bethmann. “My intentions with making sure the film was going to reach Native audiences and youth has been really special,” she said. “To see that reaction and have it received with so much love and gratitude, that we’re able to share Ku’s story with so many different communities has been really nice.”
In 2021, hundreds of unmarked graves were discovered at a former boarding school in Kamloops, Canada. It led to more widespread knowledge of boarding school atrocities. The discovery also led to unearthing hundreds of unmarked graves at U.S. schools as well.
Now the matter has reached the court room. In the most recent class-action lawsuit, the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California filed a case against the federal government in May. They are suing over misused funds, which had been designated for Native Nations, but were spent on the Federal Indian Boarding School system.
Currently, the sovereign nations are requesting the U.S. itemize a $23 billion trust fund. A trust that was established by pressuring Native nations to sign agreements. Most of these treaties promised that the U.S. would educate Indigenous children in exchange for their land.
That wasn’t what happened. “The United States government itself knows that these schools did not educate [children] the way they intended to educate,” UNLV researcher Delgado said.
The communal trauma of boarding schools still affects Indigenous families across the nation. Many elders do not want to share what they experienced on these campuses. But increasingly, many families want to heal.
At 21, Stevens has seen a way to start that process. "I think we heal as a community by showing up for one another,” Stevens said. “There’s not enough of that in the world right now.”
The film, “Remaining Native,” is still available for community screenings at www.remainingnativedocumentary.com/screenings.
