Ada Blackjack’s survival is not reducible to the colonial frame of the expedition. But the frame is the context of her presence on the island, and ignoring it is ignoring something real about why she was there, who sent her, and what it cost.
Stefansson drew public anger from the families of the men who died. Roald Amundsen, one of the great polar explorers of the era, called him “the greatest humbug alive,” a reference to his management of both the Wrangel Island expedition and his earlier Karluk disaster. Amundsen’s assessment is reported with a caveat about its sourcing, but the general tenor of historical judgment on Stefansson’s management of the Wrangel Island expedition has been critical.
He sent people to an island without adequate supplies, without adequate preparation, without a reliable plan for resupply, in pursuit of a territorial claim that neither Canada nor Britain actually wanted. Four people died. One survived, through her own extraordinary effort, and was minimally compensated for what she endured.
## Why She Survived When They Did Not
The question of why Ada Blackjack survived the Wrangel Island expedition when four men did not is worth examining directly, because the answer is not simple and the simple versions that have sometimes been offered are not adequate.
She survived, in part, because she was not among the three who walked onto the ice in January 1923. The decision to walk toward Siberia was almost certainly fatal, and she did not make it — either because she was excluded from the decision, because she chose not to go, or because Knight’s condition required someone to stay. The three men who left did not survive. She and Knight, who stayed, were the remaining pair. Knight’s death from scurvy in June was not survivable; Ada’s experience of the same conditions was survivable, at least in part because she managed to keep herself adequately fed in ways that Knight did not or could not.