The documents are accessible to researchers and have been used to tell Ada’s story. They have also been held, for most of the past century, at an institution that is not in Alaska and is not an Indigenous institution. These two facts coexist in the historical record without a simple resolution.
## What the Expedition Was Actually Doing: The Colonial Frame
It is worth naming, clearly and without euphemism, what the Wrangel Island expedition of 1921 was.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson sent a group of people, one of whom was Indigenous, to an island claimed by Russia, for the purpose of establishing a territorial claim on behalf of a colonial power — first Canada, then Britain, then some combination of the two — that had not asked to be represented in this way. The flag-raising was an act of colonial assertion on land to which the asserted claim had no legal basis.
The expedition failed. The territorial claim failed. Britain rejected it. Russia rejected it. The island remained, and remains today, Russian territory — it is now the Wrangel Island State Nature Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site recognized for its exceptional biodiversity, including the polar bear denning habitat and the populations of walruses and seabirds.
The people who died in the execution of Stefansson’s plan — Crawford, Knight, Galle, Maurer, three of whom were Americans with no particular connection to British colonial ambitions — died for a project that produced nothing. The one person who survived had been hired as a domestic worker, was not there for the colonial purpose, and had her own entirely practical reasons for taking the job.