Meet Tori McConnell
By Tori McConnell
Ayukîi! Hello, everyone. Most know me as a former Miss Indian World, but to my friends and family I’m an artist, musician, basketweaver, traditional foods practitioner, writer, and burgeoning fire practitioner. I am elated to introduce myself as the new Graton Heyday Berkeley Roundhouse Writing Intern.
I was born and raised in Wiyot lands in Eureka, California, where my parents Tammy and Jeff McConnell raised me with my younger brother Jeffrey and our older cousins. Our family is Yurok and Karuk and we are enrolled citizens of the Yurok Tribe. My brother and I’s lineage comes from many villages up and down the lower Klamath River basin, the most recent being the Yurok villages of Wahsekw, Surpur, and Rekwoi, and Karuk villages of Ameekyaaram and Túuyvuk. My mom was born and raised in Eureka, while my dad was born and raised in Hoopa until they found each other in the mid-1980s and settled down in the redwood forests of Eureka (2026 is their fortieth wedding anniversary!). Maternally, my lineage comes from askitávaansas, Karuk women. My close friend, distant relative/chosen sister Zoe Thomson, introduced me to the Karuk language community and I later went on to start a master-apprentice program with master speaker Julian Lang.
Growing up, we were blessed with an abundance of traditional foods like deer meat, tanoak mushrooms, salmon, and more. Coming from a long line of successful hunters, fishers, and gatherers, I am deeply grateful for my parents’ love, continuing that way of life so that my brother and I could have the best fuel to help our young minds and bodies grow strong. Some of my most vivid memories are of my dad waking up my brother and me at four a.m. to go gathering before school, these gathering trips interspersed among many fishing seasons with friends and family on the Klamath and road hunts in the mountains while looking for tanoaks. As a child I learned the violin, accompaniment-style piano, and jazz organ, and have been lucky to sing in multiple church choirs, the Eureka Symphony, and Davis Chamber Choir. As a lifelong artist I recently have been working in a niche of local mural work and digital art for Native and local organizations.
I started academic writing in the style of what Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy teaches as “critical fabulation” when I was in high school writing historical research papers. That is, digging into the archives and reading between the lines to illuminate stories that are otherwise left out of mainstream American history—uncovering the real history of America, as my parents would say. When I was seventeen, almost eighteen, I moved away to pursue my BA at the University of California, Davis. Things started getting more serious when my work on an extra credit assignment in my environmental law class resulted in an art piece that exploded in popularity more than any piece I’ve done before. When I was creating the piece, though, the sketch lines flowed onto my paper so effortlessly it brought tears to my eyes. It felt like this piece already existed and it was somehow just being translated through my hand onto a two-dimensional plane. I had been drawing and painting all my life, but I’d never felt it like this before.
This propelled me to pursue traditional Yurok-Karuk basketry. The question of how our ancestors cooked and survived without metal pots and pans bounced around in my head so much as a kid that I was afraid to ask it out loud. No wonder that when my traditional basketry teacher, Theresa Surbaugh, finally found me, my world was blessed with a feeling of wholeness that I’d never felt before. Cooking in a basket with hot cooking rocks is our traditional method, and basketry in general is one of the most important elements of our culture. It’s how we survived, it’s how we got here, and it’s how we have always expressed ourselves. I knew that if I was to continue being an artist, it would be essential to first learn and preserve the basketry that inspires so much of our modern art.
Being immersed in language and basketry grounded me after college. The scent of peeled willow sticks brought me back to times that I can’t remember; basketry came to me naturally and it felt so good to do something my hands seemed made for. But upon returning home there was still one more important thing to do. About a year after graduating college I was privileged to serve my family’s village of Wahsekw by packing medicine for the Yurok White Deerskin Dance, one of our World Renewal ceremonies. Following tradition, I fasted on acorn water for the duration of the ten days while we traversed our ancestral territory and prayed for our foods, our water, our river, and our people, and when the ceremony ended it rained. My cousin Louisa said that whatever you’re doing during those ten days is what you’ll be doing throughout the next year to come…and that’s where Miss Indian World came in.
Ten days of packing medicine for my people, for my land, river, and family, turned into a year of carrying the weight of the crown for Indian Country, my tribes, and California Indian peoples. So even though I’m originally from the remote far northern reaches of California, I hope to use my unique experiences as a former cultural ambassador to cover topics from Tolowa to Ipai, and from the Sierra to the coast.
I’m hoping that through this internship I’ll be able to grow in my writing while sharing stories that inspire, heal, and help us laugh and grow. That’s what I worked for during Miss Indian World and I am grateful for this most amazing opportunity to expand on that work in a new way. Lastly I’d like to give thanks to my parents, my grandparents, and ancestors that have always helped whenever I needed it. I’d also like to make it known that I’m deeply grateful for my best friend and chosen sister Muriel Xosa:k Ammon, the previous intern, who showed me what is possible through her lifestyle and actions. Wokhlew, Muriel, for showing me a prime example of what it means to thrive in this internship program, and wokhlew’ Terria Smith and Heyday for providing such a beautiful and enlightening experience for one lucky intern.
