It was an environment with specific, knowable characteristics — characteristics that Indigenous peoples had spent thousands of years learning.

People who knew those characteristics could live in the Arctic.

People who didn’t, generally could not — or could only do so with enormous difficulty, at significant cost, and with a much lower margin of error than people who knew the environment from the inside.

The question that Wrangel Island posed — and that Arctic research has been working to answer ever since — was not whether the Arctic could sustain human life.

The Iñupiat had answered that question thousands of years before Stefansson was born.