Radio: ‘CREATIVES on WRFI - ‘Remaining Native’ a Conversation with Indigenous Filmmaker Paige Bethmann’

WRFI Community Radio - Audio Interview - December 2025

Zoë Van Nostrand interviews Paige Bethmann (Mohawk & Oneida) on her recent documentary Remaining Native. This screening of "Remaining Native" is made possible in full with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, administered by the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.

Paige Bethmann is a Haudenosaunee from the Mohawk and Oneida communities, and has worked in non-fiction television for various digital and broadcast networks such as ESPN, PBS, Vox Media, Youtube Originals, USA, and NBC. She is a graduate of Ithaca College, with a bachelor’s degree in Film, Television, and Radio from the Park School of Communications. Remaining Native is her first feature film.

The interview explores Paige's role and identity as a storyteller in her community, and the responsibility she feels as a descendant of a boarding school survivor in telling the story of Ku and his relationship with his grandfather who ran away from his residential boarding school through the Nevada desert three separate times as a child. The interview explores the role of the sacred in the film, and Ku's athleticism as a teenage track star aiming to run at University of Oregon.

Trigger Warning(s): The interview discusses the impact of residential boarding schools on Indigenous communities