The word is traditional and has fallen out of favor in some contemporary usages, but it carries a specific charge in the context of Ada Blackjack’s story. A hero is someone who acts in extraordinary circumstances with extraordinary effect. A heroine is the feminine form of that. Billy chose the traditional word and applied it accurately: his mother had acted in extraordinary circumstances, under extraordinary difficulty, with extraordinary results. The plaque is the simplest summary of her life.
## What the Story Actually Tells Us
The story of Ada Blackjack and the Wrangel Island expedition is sometimes told primarily as a survival story, and it is a survival story — one of the most remarkable in the historical record of Arctic exploration. But survival stories are often told in ways that isolate the survival from its context, making the story into a testament to individual human capacity while minimizing the structural circumstances that shaped who survived and who didn’t, and why, and at what cost.
Ada Blackjack survived because of skills she had — her sewing and domestic competencies, which were the expedition’s immediate need and which she used throughout the two years — and skills she acquired — hunting, trapping, construction, the management of a camp and its threats. She survived because of the specific conditions of Wrangel Island in the summer of 1923, which allowed her to hunt and trap and maintain herself. She survived because a relief ship reached the island in August before the winter made survival untenable. She survived because of characteristics of her own — the sustained effort, the adaptation, the willingness to keep working in conditions where working was all she could do.