She also took photographs. The photographs Ada Blackjack took on Wrangel Island — some of herself, some of the camp, some of the terrain and wildlife — are part of the expedition’s documentary record. She had access to the expedition’s camera and she used it. The photographs she took of herself, alone in the camp, are self-portraits made in conditions that had no precedent in her life or in most people’s lives. She was documenting herself, as she was documenting her situation in the typed messages — maintaining a record of her presence and her survival.
The photographs and the typed messages and the diary and the beaded slippers and the second boat built after the first washed away: all of these are evidence of a person who was not passively waiting to be rescued but was actively managing her existence, producing a record of that existence, and making things — useful things and personal things — while the time passed.
## Sixty Years of Private Life
Between August 1923, when the Donaldson brought her back from Wrangel Island, and May 1983, when she died in Palmer, Alaska, Ada Blackjack lived sixty years that the historical record does not document in detail.
She retrieved Bennett and paid for his tuberculosis treatment. He recovered. She returned to Alaska. She married again — a man named Johnson — and had her second son, Billy. The marriage was, by the accounts that have survived, not a happy one; it ended in divorce. She lived for most of the rest of her life in Alaska, in various places, in the various circumstances of a private person who did not seek public attention and who, after the brief media exposure of 1923-1924, was not particularly sought out by the public.