By Paige Bethmann
Before my grandmother passed away in 2019, I went to visit her in the hospital where she’d been for a few weeks. When I arrived, the nurses smiled and said, “We really should be charging admission for all the visitors she has.” A renowned Mohawk storyteller — relatives, friends, and staff came by on their lunch breaks to listen to my grandmother recall her experiences as an educator, about her family, and her predictions for Wheel of Fortune. However, in this rare visitor window, it was just her and I.
As I sat in the chair beside her, I asked her to retell me a traditional story: “How the Birds Got Their Songs.” It was one that I knew by heart as a little girl sitting at her feet years ago, when I fell in love with the colorful pictures she painted with her words. The story brings together all of the birds in the forest for a competition — a race to the Skyworld, and whoever could make it there first would receive the most beautiful song. As I eagerly awaited for her to begin, she yawned, smiled, and said, “No, you tell it to me.”
To be given space and trust as a storyteller is a rare generosity and, as I sit here in 2025, I feel that this memory of my grandmother entrusting me is mirrored in my experience as a Sundance Institute–supported artist through the Documentary Film Program (Edit and Story Lab), with my first feature film, Remaining Native, a coming-of-age documentary told from the perspective of 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.
In the summer of 2023, Remaining Native had been selected to participate as one of the four films in the Sundance Institute Edit and Story lab, alongside Blacked Out Dreams (U.S.A.), Concrete Land (Jordan), and No Other Land.”(Palestine/Israel). Upon arriving at the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah, editor Stephanie Khoury and I shared a 90-minute cut of the film in front of peers, the Institute team, a group of contributing editor fellows, Jessica Jones, Beth Kearsley, Claudia Ramirez and Emily Yue, and the Documentary Film Program’s advisors Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Citizen Four) Bhawin Suchak (Outta The Muck), Terra Long (Going to Mars: Nikki Giovanni Project, Land Fall), Steven Golliday (Dreamland), and Andrea Chignoli (Igualada, Sanson and Me).
We carefully absorbed the suggestions, questions, critiques, and encouragement. However, later that day, I found myself sitting on a bench near a stream, frozen by fear. How the hell were we going to make our movie? I was perplexed by the task at hand, frantically trying to come up with solutions to adhere to the feedback given and find the quickest way to resolve every narrative obstacle in the matter of four days time — the remaining time we had left at the lab — when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Kristin Feeley, Director of Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Programs, reassured me that in no way was I expected to complete the film in a week. Huge relief! In that moment I realized that our creative process, for myself and for the film, needed to slow down. We needed to reground ourselves in order to take risks and ultimately to trust the story. That kind of support is not always visible on paper, but it is deeply felt in the process of making something meaningful.
Now, two years later, with the premiere of Remaining Native at SXSW in March, taking home the Special Jury Award and the Audience Award, we have been struck by the lasting legacy of the Sundance Institute community and support. We premiered the film to full audiences, traveling internationally, garnering awards and recognition, but more importantly, we were able to activate what is at the core of the support we’ve received. This film, and many others like it, have full lives in the theater and outside of them. Being part of the Documentary Film Program affirmed that we’re not creating in isolation.
Since March, we’ve held 62 screenings, nine Community 5K runs, working with partners like Nike, Running Strong For American Indian Youth, Doc Society, the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, bringing Indigenous communities, local runners, and filmmakers together to raise critical awareness around the lasting impacts of Indian boarding schools.
This fall, we are planning for our Oscars qualifying run at DCTV in November, and a series of special community screenings alongside Sundance Film Festival award-winning short, Tiger, directed by Loren Waters. We have also joined an initiative alongside Doc Society and five other Indigenous films to bring our work to the community for free as part of the Indigenous Impact Alliance.
We’re filled with gratitude as Sundance Institute–supported artists through the Documentary Film Program and the Edit and Story Lab, being welcomed into a thoughtful and intentional ecosystem where vision and intention are not only valued but nurtured. It allowed me to return to the core of why I’m making this film, offering the space to reflect, refine, and recommit to the deeper truths I’m trying to tell, and, like my grandmother passing the reins to me, to trust that we know how to tell the story and we’re the right ones to do it.
— Paige, Jess, and the Remaining Native documentary team
Follow the film team at www.remainingnativedocumentary.com and on Instagram @remainingnative, sign up to host a screening through the Indigenous Impact Alliance from now until Nov 20
