In September 1921, a small expedition landed on Wrangel Island—a remote, icebound island in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia.
There were five people in the party: four young men with dreams of exploration and adventure, and a 23-year-old Iñupiat woman named Ada Blackjack.
Ada was not an explorer. She had no desire to conquer the Arctic, claim territory, or make history. She was a single mother from Nome, Alaska, and she desperately needed money to care for her young son, Bennett, who was suffering from tuberculosis. She had been hired as the expedition’s seamstress and cook, with the understanding that other Iñupiat families would be joining the group.
They never did.
Instead, Ada found herself the only woman—and the only Indigenous member—of a tiny expedition attempting something extraordinarily dangerous: occupying Wrangel Island for two years and claiming it for the British Empire.
Behind the plan was controversial Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a man famous for promoting his belief in the “Friendly Arctic”—the idea that properly skilled explorers could live off the land and thrive in an environment most people considered nearly unsurvivable.
The expedition arrived with limited supplies and enormous confidence.
At first, remarkably, things seemed to work.
They built their camp. They hunted. They trapped foxes. They learned the rhythms of the island. Ada, initially terrified and deeply unhappy, slowly began to find her place among the men. Relationships that had started badly improved. For a time, Wrangel Island seemed almost to be proving Stefansson right.
But the Arctic had other plans.
When the ship expected to reach them the following summer failed to arrive, the expedition was forced to prepare for another winter. Supplies dwindled. Isolation deepened. And then one member of the party—Lorne Knight—began showing signs of an illness every Arctic explorer feared.
Scurvy.
In Part 1 of Ada Blackjack: The Woman Wrangel Island Couldn't Kill, we follow the expedition from its controversial beginnings through its first year on Wrangel Island: why these five people were sent there, the strange geopolitical ambitions behind the mission, Ada’s difficult adjustment to life at camp, the group’s attempts to survive off the land, the failed effort to reach them—and the moment their Arctic adventure begins turning into something far more dangerous.
Because what happened next would leave Ada Blackjack facing circumstances almost impossible to imagine.
And her story was only beginning.
Part 2 continues the story of the Wrangel Island expedition and Ada Blackjack’s extraordinary fight for survival.
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