Ada Blackjack, 1898-1983. Ada Blackjack and Vic, the expedition cat. 1920. Wrangel Island Expedition Photographs. Digital by Dartmouth Library. Dartmouth Libraries. 

Arctic history has been equated with the history of Euro-American exploration, exploitation, and settlement in Arctic regions at the turn of the last century – a colonial encounter between the West and the Arctic Other. This activity was legitimated and sustained by a myriad of textual and visual representations which not only favored one side of the encounter over the other, but also produced cultural stereotypes that still prevail in cultural representations of Arctic Indigeneity. 

An expedition diary written by Iñupiat Alaskan Ada Delutuk Blackjack in 1923 suggests that there are other ways of envisioning the shared colonial past. Blackjack was a hired seamstress on a small occupation colony on Wrangel Island in Chukotka in the Arctic Ocean, organized by renowned explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson who later published the official account of the venture, The Adventure of Wrangel Island (1925). In that account, Blackjack is given the role of Indigenous assistant to the crew of four white men who would legitimize Canadian claim to the island through occupation, thereby also demonstrating the superior adaptability of the educated western male in the Arctic wilderness. Before leaving, the men had been instructed to bring two essential pieces of the expedition outfitting: An umiak or lightweight skinboat for hunting and an Inuit seamstress to take care of the clothing.  

Impenetrable ice turned one planned winter into almost two years on the island, and after Blackjack’s companions tragically died, she found herself all alone, a castaway on a desolate island in the Arctic Ocean. The Wrangel Island diary, handwritten on scraps of paper – now an archival fragment in the much larger Stefansson collection – is a day-to-day record of her remarkable survival. Blackjack’s entries are brief, almost taciturn in style, and the diary a seemingly neutral logbook that continuously returns to the same topics: hunting and harvesting, signs of animal life, ice conditions, needlework, diet and health. By plotting these topics against the greater rhythm of the seasons, however, change appears. Pitch dark winter months give way to spring, the midnight sun and the much-needed return of animal life. Parallelly, despair give way to the restoration of health and hope for Blackjack, who eventually was rescued. This photo of her, together with the expedition’s cat, Vic, was taken onboard the Donaldson, the vessel that took Blackjack off the island in late August 1923. Back to her son, family, friends and home in Nome, Alaska. 

A representation of Blackjack as expedition assistant or “equipment”, found in the authoritative and until recently only available narratives of the Wrangel Island expedition, undermines the kind of agency and individuality she assumes through her own writing – her persistent and heterogenous being in the world which the diary can only offer a glimpse of. By creating a subject position for Blackjack within the established script of the male, masculine, western explorer-hero as protagonist, the Wrangel Island diary demonstrates the shortcomings of the western colonial archive. 

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Read more in Gaupseth (2023), “The Mosaics of an Arctic Seamstress: Narrative Versions of Ada Blackjack on Wrangel Island, 1921–1923”, Interventions 25(7) 928–947. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2023.2190920 

Essay by Silje Gaupseth