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NATIVE AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL
RUNNER KUTOVEN STEVENS,
WHO USES THE SPORT TO
INSPIRE CHANGE, IS HEADED TO
THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
By Henry Houston
H
igh school runner and Yerington Paiute
tribe member Kutoven Stevens remem-
bers his most recent trip to Eugene
because it was the day he committed
to run for the University of Oregon, his
dream college.
Accompanied by his family, as well as
a team of documentary filmmakers, Stevens had a tour of
Hayward Field and then headed outside to take a breath
of air, Stevens tells Eugene Weekly.
“I took a knee and sat down for a second. It was hitting
me hard,” he says. “I’ve worked so hard for this. So many
people that got me to this point. All the training. All the
hours. And finally, I’m here. It was a moving moment.”
Stevens isn’t the typical high school athlete heading
to the UO. A resident of Yerington, Nevada, population
3,137, and member of the Yerington Paiute tribe, he’ll be
one of the few Native American athletes who have ever
competed for the UO. In getting there, he’s faced the trials
of competing as the only runner on his high school team.
Throughout his running successes, Stevens has kept
his ancestry on his mind, which led to a race he organized
in remembrance of his grandfather who escaped an Indian
boarding school in Nevada and inspired the documentary
film Remaining Native.
“When you’re born in a community like I was, you want
to get out and make a change and make a difference,”
he says. “Through my running, I figured that’s the way I
could make my mark on the world. I could go out there, be
noticed and inspire other people to be active.”
Stevens started running competitively in middle school.
As a fifth grader, he says, he was considered too young to
compete, but the track coach saw his running talent and
made an exception for Stevens, allowing him to compete
against sixth graders.
It was around that time when Stevens heard from
someone that the UO was the best place for running. “I
was like, really? All right, then I’m going to go to UO some-
day,” he remembers. “It was from that moment on that I
made a promise to myself, and I have to hold myself to it.”
KUTOVEN STEVENS
CARRIES PEACE AND
DIGNITY JOURNEY’S
EAGLE STAFF
Photo courtesy SCHH Productions
That promise is what kept him dedicated to running and
working out, he says, even when his high school wouldn’t
fund a one-man team.
As a junior in high school, Stevens was the lone runner
on the Yerington High School cross country team, which
didn’t have a coach. He designed his own workouts and
“flew blind,” he says. With one person on the team, his
high school wouldn’t provide transportation to races, so
he says he worked a part time job for gas money. Some-
where in between school and work, he found the time to
run about 60 miles a week. “It was rough for sure,” he says.
Despite the lack of resources, in May 2021, Stevens won
a track and field regional title as an individual in the 2021
Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association Northern
2A Region Championships.
Still running for Yerington as a senior, Stevens started
training with the Damonte Ranch High School team in Reno,
an hour from his home. And he’s continued to dominate as
an individual. On Nov. 9, 2021, Stevens won a cross coun-
try state individual title, and on Jan. 31, he was named a
Gatorade Nevada Boys Cross Country Player of the Year.
When Stevens moves to Eugene, he says, he’s an “invited
walk-on,” meaning the UO didn’t award him one of its
NCAA scholarships. He says the UO told him that if he
wins races and proves himself on the track, he can then
get that scholarship from the university. During the fall,
he’ll run cross country, and in spring, track and field.
Running isn’t just a sport for Stevens. He’s used it to
raise awareness of Native American issues. And one book
has helped fuel that drive.
Stevens says his father recommended the book Bury
My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the Ameri-
can West, by Dee Brown, a recount of American history
through the lens of Native Americans, which he listened
to an audiobook edition of while training.
“My dad wanted me to read the book at a young age
because he said it also impacted him,” Stevens says.
“After he read that he was mad and angry. But the best
way he could get back at the people he was mad at was
to get educated, because an educated Native American
is a dangerous Native American.”
Stevens says reading the book made him mad, too.
And in 2021, he took on the goal of educating the running
community about Indian boarding schools.
Indian boarding schools were established in North
America with the intent of forced assimilation into West-
ern culture. In the U.S., the federal government removed
Native American children from their families to attend
the schools. Children had to speak English and adopt
Western names, and many children never returned home,
according to Boarding School Healing, a nonprofit whose
mission is to understand and address the ongoing trauma
created by the U.S. Indian Boarding School policy.
Stevens organized the Remembrance Run, a 50-mile run
that started on the grounds of the Stewart Indian School, a
boarding school that ran from 1890 to 1980. Stevens’ great-
grandfather, Frank Quinn, attended the school in 1913 when
he was 8 years old and escaped the school by foot three times,
running 50 miles through the Nevada terrain.
Stevens says his father always wanted to hike those 50
miles to experience what his grandfather went through.
The two were inspired to turn that into a run after news
broke about mass graves found at the Kamloops Indian
Residential School in Canada. Stevens says that a lot of
people didn’t know that those sort of boarding schools
existed, so they hosted a run to educate the public about
the history of the schools.
The race attracted a lot of media attention, from regional
news outlets to the larger publications like Runner’s
World and The New York Times. It also caught the eye of
an upstate New York Native American filmmaker, Paige
Bethmann. The filmmaker and her team — She Carries
Her House Productions — have been following Stevens
around at track meets and filming the Remembrance Run
as well as his trip to Hayward Field for a documentary
called Remaining Native. “I never thought it would happen
this young,” he laughs. “Maybe later in life when I’d done
something cool and someone would record me for it.”
As Stevens ran through Nevada landscape for the
Remberance Run, a route with about 2,000 feet of elevation
gain and temperatures in the 90s, he says he thought about
his great-grandfather’s journey back home as a child, leav-
ing a place that was trying to erase everything about you.
“It was a lot of emotions, especially around the end,”
Stevens says. “I remember crossing this hill and looking
upon my valley, putting myself in the shoes of an 8-year-
old coming home. Maybe seeing your family there work-
ing, doing whatever they’re doing and feeling the sense
of relief that you made it.” ■
For more information about Remaining Native, visit RemainingNati-
veDocumentary.com.
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