Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Nevada teen leads 50-mile Remembrance Run to honor great-grandfather

Remembrance run

Ric Anderson

The sun rises Saturday Aug. 14, 2021, over a cemetery near the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, where a crowd that included survivors of the institution gathered to pay tribute to students buried at the site. The school, which operated from the late 1800s to 1980, was part of a U.S government program to isolate Native American children from their families in an attempt to forcefully assimilate them into white culture. Today, the institution’s administrative building has been converted to a museum and cultural center.

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Ku Stevens leads participants Saturday, Aug. 14, 2021, at the start of a two-day run to raise awareness about Native American boarding schools and pay tribute to those who were confined at those institutions. Stevens, a Yerington High School student, initiated the event in honor of his great-grandfather, who escaped the Stewart Indian School in the 1910s.

CARSON CITY — As dawn broke Saturday in Nevada’s capital, Yerington teenager Ku Stevens stood on grounds where the U.S. government once confined his great-grandfather and other Native American children in an attempt to force their assimilation into white culture.

Stevens’ purpose for coming to this place, the Stewart Indian School, was to lead a 50-mile run along the route his great-grandfather, Frank “Togo” Quinn, had taken three times in escaping the school more than a century ago.

There would be no medals for this run, no leaderboard, no stopwatches. The point wasn’t for participants to compete, but rather to honor the resilience and courage of those who were victimized here, and to ensure that the world would never forget what they experienced.

“This is not a protest,” Stevens, a high school senior and national-caliber track athlete, told participants as they gathered in a ceremonial circle on the school lawn. “It’s a remembrance. This is something we’ve heard of from our past, and it’s finally coming to light.”

A statement on the runners’ high-visibility orange shirts encapsulated the spirit of the event: “For those who ran, those who survived and those who did not make it home.”

A crowd of about 150 people turned out for the start of the two-day run, some to either walk or run at least part of the route; others were there in support the cause of raising awareness about Native American boarding schools in the aftermath of the recent discoveries of more than 1,000 unmarked graves of children at such schools in Canada. After those discoveries, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched a comprehensive review of American boarding schools with an emphasis on finding burial sites and unmarked cemeteries.

Stewart, on the southern edge of Carson City, was among more than 250 Native American boarding schools in the U.S., which were established in the late 19th century under a premise encapsulated by the founder of one of the largest institutions of its type, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania — to “kill the Indian in him, save the man.”

For decades, the schools operated like a combination of military academies and forced labor camps, with students being required to conduct marching drills and perform manual labor while being taught only rudimentary academic courses. Some of the children were sent voluntarily by their families, while others were abducted by the government. Children as young as 4 years old were confined at Stewart, where family visits were not allowed.

Students were given Christian names and were strictly forbidden from speaking their own language or practicing their own customs.

The schools were underfunded, nutrition was poor and medical care was lacking. Deaths from diseases and negligence were common, and stories passed down by families describe many children as dying from the emotional trauma of loneliness and isolation — they simply stopped eating.

How many deaths occurred is not known, as record-keeping was often poor and what few documents did survive have since been lost or destroyed.

This was the environment in which Frank Quinn arrived as an 8-year-old in the 1910s, where his yearning for his family led him to run three times back to Yerington.

Ku Stevens’ father, Delmar, heard that story growing up and, while raising Ku, came upon the idea of the run as a way to help connect the boy to his heritage.

“Ku was 8, and I thought, ‘We’ll put on backpacks one of these days and take off?” Delmar, a social worker, said Saturday.

But when Ku learned of the discoveries in Canada, the idea went from conceptual to reality. He instigated the event, and he and his family led the way in coordinating with support drivers, sponsors and others for the two-day trek.

"This is his journey," said his father, who led the support team along the route.

About 80 people signed up to complete at least some portion of the run, which was essentially a back-to-back series of marathons on a route through the Northern Nevada sagebrush. Mandatory rest stops occurred every 5 miles, with participants encouraged to proceed at their own pace along the remote path. Temperatures in region reached into the triple digits both days of the run; smoke from wildfires in Northern California lingered in the air under hazy, sunny skies.

The run served as the hub of a larger event that drew survivors of the school and their families together on the campus and at the campsite at the midway point overnight Saturday to share their stories and remember their ancestors.

They were people like Janice Eben Stump of Reno, who attended the school from 1968 to 1972 and whose parents both were there in the 1930s. As she spoke during a remembrance Saturday at the cemetery near the school, where some 100 students are buried, she told listeners, “If I cry, you’ve got to cry with me.”

Several did so as Eben Stump described how her parents were too traumatized to talk about their experiences at Stewart, where many students went years without seeing their parents and were physically abused. In some cases, families were broken apart by the schools, as students lost the ability to communicate with their relatives.

“You hear how they used to go out and dig potatoes in the field because they were so hungry, and it’s just so sad,” Eben Stump said.

The museum and cultural center that opened last year in the school’s administrative building speaks to the sorrow through exhibits like several handwritten letters from parents pleading for information after hearing their children were sick, and a photo showing students being delivered to the school in a high-sided, open-air truck.

But as Eben Stump and others said, the weekend wasn’t about grieving but of celebrating the resilience of the students who, despite the pain that was inflicted on them, survived by forming a community at the school and helping each other through the ordeal.

“They’re the reason we’re here today,” said Marty Meeden, who helped organized the cemetery visit.

That message is underscored in the museum, which presents the narrative of Stewart as a triumph by the survivors over the failed policy of assimilation. The underlying message is similar to that of Holocaust museums and memorials — that what occurred at boarding schools should never be forgotten, lest it occur again.

“What my grandfather and his family went through should never have happened,” Delmar Stevens said. “Our families had their children ripped away from them, and they did nothing wrong — nothing. People should know what happened here, and what happened at other schools like this. And that’s why we’re here, to raise awareness.”