Most of the women who appear in early twentieth century polar and Arctic expedition records appear as marginal figures — the wives who waited, the unnamed workers in expedition accounts, the people mentioned in passing in the journals of the men who were considered the subjects of the story. Ada Blackjack is the subject of her story, and the record she produced on the island is one of the primary documents of what happened there.
The April 2 diary entry about the “black stirp for Bennett school book bag” is written in the English she learned at the mission school, phonetically rendered, unpolished in the way that private notes under extreme conditions are always unpolished. The July 23 typed entry “I thank God for living” is brief and direct in the way that the most precise statements tend to be. Neither entry requires scholarly apparatus to understand what it says. Both entries say, in her own words, what she was thinking in specific documented moments on Wrangel Island.
That record — partial, partially censored, held in an archive far from Alaska — is the foundation of what we know about Ada Blackjack from her own perspective. The biography that Jennifer Niven wrote in 2003 drew on it carefully. The accounts that have followed have drawn on Niven and on the archive. The words trace back to her.
She was twenty-three years old when she arrived on Wrangel Island, hired as a seamstress, alone among men who did not always treat her well. She was twenty-five when she left, the last human standing, carrying the furs she had trapped and the photographs she had taken and the diary she had kept in the conditions of one of the most difficult survival experiences in the recorded history of Arctic exploration. She had set out for ordinary reasons. She came back having done something extraordinary. She went home to her son.