## Lorne Knight’s Father and the Defense
John Knight, Lorne’s father, publicly came to Ada’s defense.
He had met Ada after the rescue, when she visited Oregon and spent time with the Knight family. He said he had warm feelings toward her and believed she had done everything she could for his son. He said the accusations against her were “cruel and unfounded.” He specifically contested Noice’s account.
The Knight family’s defense of Ada is significant for several reasons. They were the people with the most personal stake in knowing what had happened to Lorne Knight. They were the people who would have had the most reason to assign blame if they believed blame was warranted. Instead, they said she had cared for him until the end, and they said publicly that they believed her.
John Knight’s statement was a direct refutation of Noice’s accusations from a source that carried moral weight in the public context of the dispute. It did not end the controversy — the accusations continued to circulate — but it established that the people closest to the man who had died did not believe Ada had done anything wrong.
Knight’s father was not Iñupiaq. He was not a woman. He was an American man whose adult son had died, and he was saying that the Indigenous woman who had cared for his son in the last months of that son’s life had not failed him. In the social context of 1923-1924 America, that statement had a specific weight that Ada’s own account alone might not have carried.