Niven’s book drew on Ada’s own diary and on the wider documentary record to tell the story from Ada’s perspective, which is where it belongs.
## The Dartmouth Archive and the Primary Record
The expedition’s documents are held at Dartmouth College’s Rauner Special Collections Library, which maintains the Stefansson Collection — a significant archive of materials related to Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s expeditions, including the Wrangel Island expedition. Ada Blackjack’s diary, the expedition members’ diaries, correspondence, and photographs are part of this archive.
The archive’s existence is significant for several reasons. It preserves the primary record of what happened on Wrangel Island from multiple perspectives. It allows researchers and historians to examine the documents that Noice manipulated and to assess the extent of the manipulation. It holds Ada’s own words in a form that can be consulted and studied.
Ada’s diary at Dartmouth shows the gaps that Noice left — the missing pages, the blacked-out sections. The gaps are themselves evidence. They document not only what she wrote but what someone decided, after the fact, should not be available. The missing pages are a record of censorship as well as a record of its existence.
The archive’s institutional custody raises questions about stewardship that are genuinely complex. The documents were taken from Ada without her consent. They are now held by an American university. The question of what kind of access and what kind of ownership is appropriate — given that the primary subject of the documents was an Indigenous woman whose community and whose descendants have their own relationship to her story — is one that archival institutions are increasingly grappling with in the contemporary context.