## The Alaska Legislature’s Citation and What Recognition Accomplishes
The Alaska Legislature issued its citation recognizing Ada Blackjack’s heroism in late June 1983, approximately one month after her death on May 29 of that year. The citation described her heroism as having “gone unnoticed for so many years.”
The timing — a formal recognition that arrived after the recognized person was dead — is a pattern that appears in many stories of women and Indigenous people whose contributions were not acknowledged in their lifetimes. The pattern is common enough that it has a kind of generic quality, a formal acknowledgment of systematic inadequacy that does not undo the inadequacy itself. The citation is real. The recognition it represents is real. The fact that Ada Blackjack was not alive to receive it is also real.
What formal recognition accomplishes, when it comes after the person’s death, is primarily a matter of the historical record. It establishes, in an official document, that the state of Alaska acknowledged what Ada Blackjack did. It enters that acknowledgment into the record that future generations and future historians can consult. It changes nothing about what happened during her lifetime but it changes something about how what happened is officially remembered.
Billy’s plaque — “Heroine — Wrangel Island Expedition 1921-1923” — was placed before the Alaska Legislature’s citation, and it is the memorial record that her son chose. Billy was the child she had after the expedition, her second son, who grew up with a mother who had done something extraordinary and who knew, in the specific and personal way that a son knows his mother, what she had been. He chose the word “heroine.” Not survivor, not victim, not pioneer. Heroine.