## Wrangel Island Then and Now: From Colonial Claim to World Heritage Site
Wrangel Island is today the Wrangel Island State Nature Reserve, a protected area of the Russian Federation established in 1976 and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004. The designation acknowledged the island’s extraordinary ecological significance: it supports the world’s largest concentration of Pacific walrus haul-outs, the world’s highest density of polar bear maternity dens, the nesting habitat of the Snow Goose and numerous other Arctic species, and a geological and biological record that includes some of the last surviving populations of woolly mammoths, which lived on Wrangel Island until approximately 4,000 years ago — long after the species had gone extinct elsewhere.
The island that Stefansson sent five people to occupy as a colonial outpost is, in the twenty-first century, a place of recognized global ecological importance, closed to all but strictly regulated visitors and researchers, managed by Russia as one of its most significant natural reserves.
The gap between those two descriptions — colonial outpost in 1921, World Heritage Site in 2004 — is a measure of how much the frameworks through which the world understands remote Arctic islands have changed. In 1921, the relevant framework was colonial: who could claim the island, plant a flag, establish presence, and argue for sovereignty. In the twenty-first century, the relevant framework is ecological: what lives there, what the island’s biodiversity represents for the global environment, how to protect it from human disturbance.
Russia’s sovereignty over Wrangel Island was never successfully challenged by Britain’s flag-planting or Stefansson’s plans. The flag was raised. Russia noted it with displeasure. The subsequent Soviet government sent its own expedition to the island in 1924 and removed the Soviet Canadians and Alaska Natives who were there in a later Stefansson-organized settlement attempt — a further chapter in the island’s colonial history that falls outside Ada Blackjack’s story. Wrangel Island has been Russian territory, in practice and in law, throughout the century since the expedition.