Tobi Iverson — Screenwriter · Cultural Producer

Feature Film

Thrown from a cliff at birth, she survived. A castaway daughter carrying a volatile shamanic relic must hunt down the architect of the plague — the most feared chieftainess on the coast — or watch her world be erased forever.

Format Feature Screenplay

Setting Northwest Coast, 1862

Genre Historical Epic · Mythic Thriller

Source Diaries of Arthur Wellington Clah, Wellcome Collection, London

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The Journey

London · 2023

Wellcome Collection.
Arthur Wellington Clah's journals.

Sixty-nine volumes. Fifty years of daily writing. 650,000 words in a language he taught himself in two months.

Arthur Wellington Clah — Tsimshian diarist, holding his journal

He capsized in the Skeena in January. Ice an inch thick. Half an hour in a freezing river. He swam to shore. He wrote it down. Then he kept going.

When smallpox reached Fort Simpson in 1862 — the epidemic at the heart of this film — Clah counted the dead himself. 363 Tsimshian. 266 at Fort Simpson alone. He wrote every number down.

He wrote his mission across every journal: 'writed by him to let all new people know about old People.' The only known Indigenous account of the 1862 Northwest Coast smallpox epidemic — written by my great-great-grandfather.

Tobi Iverson holding open pages of Arthur Wellington Clah's journal — Wellcome Collection, London

When I touched those pages in London, I knew I had to finish the screenplay.

Seattle · 2026

Burke Museum.
Bill Holm Center — Connections to Culture.

I was selected to study the Northwest Coast collection. Two days in the archives with objects dating to pre-contact — bentwood boxes, Chilkat robes, raven rattles, masks from the Nass River.

One box stopped me. Pre-contact. No lid. Lost somewhere across two centuries. A hole in the corner from a mouse.

I wore gloves. I put my hands on it anyway.

Bentwood box — Burke Museum collection, pre-contact

I asked how old. Pre-contact, they told me. But the wood it was made from — older. The dirt it grew in held the bones and dust of those ancestors. Much older than that.

I wanted it to speak. I half expected it to.

It didn't. But my heart did. My stomach did.

Clah knew boxes like this. He may have known this one. Nobody will ever know. But this is the research that cannot be replicated — because it is also inheritance.

The Obligation.

"If he could do that, I can finish a screenplay. That's not inspiration. That's obligation. The good kind."

I came to this material gradually — through archival research, family history, and reconnecting with the culture and history of the Northwest Coast. What I found was a great-great-grandfather who wrote against all odds for fifty years, in a language he taught himself, so that someone like me might one day find it.

His journals are a public record now, held for over a century at the Wellcome Collection. I came to them as a descendant — and chose to carry what I found forward, alongside the community still holding this world today.

The work continues in ongoing relationship with the institutions that hold this history and the Northwest Coast communities whose story it is.

The record-keeping did not stop with Clah. His grandson, William Beynon, became the leading ethnographer of the Tsimshian peoples — Franz Boas himself sought the family's collaboration. Tobi Iverson is the third generation to carry the record. The screen is simply the next medium.