Born: 1898, United States
Died: 1983
Country most active: Russia
Also known as: NA
The lone survivor of an ill-fated scientific expedition, this Iñupiat woman survived for two years on Wrangel Island, a remote arctic island north of Siberia. She had joined the five-person expedition as a cook and seamstress soon after a divorce left her destitute in order to get money to take care of her son. On 15 September 1921, the team was left on the island to claim it for Canada or Great Britain. Ada had been misled to believe she would be only one of many Alaska Native people to join the crew; instead, she was left with four white men. When conditions worsened, three of the men left to find help and were never heard from again; the fourth man died of scurvy, leaving Ada with the only other surviving member of the team – a cat named Vic. Ada used traditional Iñupiat skills to survive in the extreme conditions until she was rescued on 19 August 1923. Ada used the money she earned to take her son to Seattle to cure his tuberculosis. She later remarried and had another son, eventually, returning to the Arctic where she lived until age 85. A private person, hated the media attention and the attempts by her rescuer and the man who had funded the expedition to exploit her story. Except for the salary that she made on the trip and a few hundred dollars for furs she had trapped while on Wrangel, Ada did not benefit from her ordeal, and received nothing from the books that were written about it.
The following is adapted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book, Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Ada Blackjack thought Harold Noice was her saviour. Instead, he did everything he could to destroy her reputation, not out of malice, but out of greed and self-preservation. And that was after she’d already survived a horrific ordeal that left four men dead.
In 1921, unable to find work that would enable her to care for her son, who was sick with tuberculosis, and having left her abusive husband, Blackjack accepted a job that would turn into hell on earth. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, one of many white guys with more money than sense, devised a cockamamie plan to claim Wrangel Island in the Arctic and then try to sell it to the U.K., Canada (then part of the U.K. Commonwealth) or the U.S. So, he sent four white guys and Blackjack, of the Iñupiat, off with only six months of supplies for a one-year expedition that ended up lasting two. Their rations, of course, ran out and the group were unable to hunt enough food to survive. Stefansson’s foolishness had also created an international incident, which impeded much-needed supplies from getting to the group. Three of the men sledded off to get help and were never seen again. The fourth man, Lorne Knight, was sick with scurvy and so was left behind with Blackjack to care for him. Despite her best efforts, he died in June 1923, just under a month before the rescue team, led by Harold Noice, showed up.
Even before Noice had set out, he was anticipating making money off the disaster, as his lawyer had sold exclusive newspaper rights for $3,000 for the story of the relief expedition. This included telling the members of the party — which turned out to only be Blackjack — not to speak with the press themselves. But, of course, Blackjack didn’t know that as she collapsed with relief at being rescued, having spent almost a month with no company except a dead body and a cat named Victoria. Meanwhile, Noice immediately began looting the camp, taking both Knight’s and Blackjack’s diaries, without her consent, as well as photos she had taken on the island, the other men’s papers, and items like a typewriter. He would later ignore her requests for the return of her belongings.
Reading Knight’s diary, Noice was struck by both the incompetence and the mistreatment of Blackjack—struck by “Arctic hysteria,” she had experienced a mental health crisis early on, including propositioning one of the men — which combined with a rumor he’d heard in Nome, Alaska, that she was a sex worker, painted a particular kind of picture in his head. The rumor may have come from the facts that she was poverty-stricken, Indigenous, and a single mother, having divorced the abusive husband she married at sixteen and left at twenty-two, as well as someone who may have drowned her sorrows in alcohol and taken up with unsuitable men (though these rumours, too, may have been unfounded). But it was that desperation and need to care for her son that led her to take a job no one else wanted.
During her “hysteria,” the men responded by withholding food, forcing her to sleep in the cold and tying her to a flagpole. It is incredibly impressive that she managed to recover—and this was at the start of the two years.
Noice took it upon himself to censor the diaries, removing whole blocks of pages (including the final ten) and erasing, then blacking out sections, ostensibly to protect the men’s reputations. He also knew that missing information would heighten the scandal he already knew would come from the situation and enable him to spin falsehoods and innuendo that complete copies of the diaries would belie. Despite having told multiple people he was going to censor the diaries, he would later try to blame Blackjack for the mutilations, trying to undermine the lone survivor’s ability to counter his lies.
Any claims of protecting the men’s reputations were soon proved false as he, the man in charge on-site, openly criticised Stefansson and Knight. For her part, Blackjack spent months adamantly avoiding the press that hounded her. While Noice’s criticisms of the men were arguably well-founded — the expedition was a mess from start to finish — that wasn’t enough. Spurred by his new, rich, and incredibly jealous wife, he began spreading lies about Blackjack as well. Unstable and obsessed with “correcting” the heroic depictions of Blackjack that were appearing in the press, Fanny Noice badgered her husband into publicising the lies he had told to appease her. One of these was the promiscuity, which only convinced Fanny that Noice himself must have slept with Blackjack as well. In addition to the claims that Blackjack was a sex worker who had been taken along to service the men in that capacity rather than cooking, sewing, and hunting, he claimed she was lazy, that she refused to work because none of the men would agree to marry her, and rather than caring for Knight, had let him die. He claimed she refused to check the traps for animals that could be killed for food, and implied she feigned her inability to shoot (having lived her whole life in missionary or city environments, Blackjack had no skill with a gun prior to the expedition, but out of necessity, did learn how to shoot while on Wrangel Island). Though he had previously published an article describing her as frail and small, weighing less than one hundred pounds, his new story was that Knight’s body was emaciated while Blackjack was found “well and fat,” claiming that she had saved her own life eating the food that would have saved Knight. Blackjack herself stated that she weighed only ninety pounds, a 25% weight loss from her typical one hundred and twenty. To support his other lies, Noice also made up things that he claimed she had said, but she maintained she never had.
Blackjack was hesitant to speak out against him for several reasons—a naturally private person, she had no desire to engage the reporters who were constantly following her. She had also promised both her employer and her rescuer that she would not speak with reporters, a vow she took seriously. She also felt indebted to Noice as the man who saved her. But with his baseless attacks on her, she finally overcame these barriers, breaking her silence on February 26, 1924. She spoke with the Los Angeles Times, which printed three extensive articles over five days.
Blackjack also had one advantage many women of color don’t have in cases of “he said, she said”—a rich white guy in her corner. As the instigator and funder of the expedition, Stefansson had a vested interest in combatting Noice’s work, both the truths and the lies, as they reflected badly on his expedition and therefore his own reputation. Neither man seems to have cared about Blackjack as a person, but for Stefansson, defending her and undermining Noice was also defending himself. Stefansson was able to force Noice to write an extensive retraction, which Stefansson published in his own book in 1925, destroying Noice’s reputation and ensuring that his version of events would not go down in history as the main narrative of Blackjack’s story.
Other than her expedition salary and a few hundred dollars she earned for the furs she trapped on Wrangel, Blackjack did not benefit at all from her two years on the island. But she used the money she saved to take her son to Seattle, Washington, to treat his tuberculosis, and he did recover. She remarried and had another son, Billy. Eventually, she returned to the Arctic, where she lived until the age of 85.