Tobi Iverson didn't choose screenwriting. It chose her — the one form that let her write what she could see coming to life on the screen. Since a filmmaking intensive first put a pen in her hand, she has spent nearly two decades reading every book, taking every class, seeking every mentor, and working toward the story that stopped her cold.
That story begins with Arthur Wellington Clah — her great-great-grandfather, a 19th-century Tsimshian man who kept a diary written in English through one of the most devastating events in Northwest Coast history.
When Clah died in 1916, a wealthy English collector named Henry Wellcome — who had visited Tsimshian country and known Clah personally — bought the diaries from his family. He placed them in his London museum. They stayed there for over a century. In boxes. Waiting.
Iverson knew they existed for thirty years before she finally went to London and opened them.
"When I laid my hands on those worn journals — the ones he kept in his breast pocket and held daily as he wrote — I felt something shift within me. He was writing under immense trauma, in another language, because he knew: this must be told. Future generations must know their people's truth."
He wrote it in defiance. In witness. In the name of his people — not what the empire recorded, but what one of their own saw, lived, and refused to let disappear. That diary sat in London for over a century. Now it becomes a film.
Iverson came to her culture as an outsider — adopted away from her people, finding her way back as an adult, clawing toward everything she had missed. The more she learned, the more she encountered a history that shook her to her foundation. Families had passed down stories of relatives who fled their villages and hid in the hills and forests, waiting for the smallpox to sweep the land, knowing they might return to find no survivors.
"I heard about my own people's history like hearing about the Holocaust for the first time. I had no idea what my people had been through. And I realized that almost no one outside the culture knew either."
That rupture — personal, generational, historical — is what Wild Woman of the Woods is built from. Like Clah, Iverson believes this story must be told in the way the world absorbs things now: through cinema. Through an epic that will outlive all of us. It is, she says, the only dream worth chasing.
She holds degrees in Anthropology and American Indian Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a former cultural interpreter and guide in Southeast Alaska, and served as Washington State Tribal Census Lead across 29 tribes. She is represented by entertainment attorney Caitlin DiMotta at Troy Gould PC.
