For Alaska Native people in Nome in 1921, the economy was structured in ways that limited their opportunities. The available work — cleaning houses, sewing clothes, casual labor — paid modestly and was contingent on the preferences of white employers. Ada Blackjack’s work as a seamstress and house cleaner was the available work, and it did not pay enough to cover both her living expenses and Bennett’s medical care.
The orphanage represented the gap between what she could earn and what Bennett needed. The Jesse Lee Home for Children was a Methodist institution, consistent with the mission school network that had educated her. It was not a punitive institution; it was a place where children without adequate family support were maintained and educated. The fact that Ada placed Bennett there was not, in the social framework of Nome in 1921, a failure or an abandonment. It was a practical response to a real financial problem: she could not simultaneously support herself and pay for tuberculosis treatment. The orphanage could provide care she could not.
But the arrangement had costs that were not only financial. Bennett was her child. The orphanage was not his home. The separation was the practical outcome of a financial structure that gave Ada few options, and the desire to end that separation and to fund Bennett’s medical treatment was the direct motivation for accepting the expedition’s offer.
Fifty dollars a month, across a year, would provide approximately six hundred dollars — a meaningful sum in Nome in 1921, and one that could cover both Bennett’s medical needs and the costs of retrieving him from the orphanage. The calculation was clear enough: go, earn the money, come back, and take Bennett home.