The knowledge of how to live there has not been lost, even if the people who hold it no longer live on the island.

It lives in the communities of northwestern Alaska and northeastern Siberia — in the Iñupiat hunters of the Alaskan coast and the Yupik peoples of Siberia whose ancestors shared with the Iñupiat the knowledge of the Arctic waters.

Ada Blackjack’s survival was a demonstration of what happens when one person, under extreme pressure, has partial access to that knowledge and the capacity to learn more under the teaching of necessity.

What she did in those two years on the island was remarkable and deeply human — the reinvention, under survival conditions, of what her ancestors had spent thousands of years perfecting.