The question was whether Ada Blackjack would survive.

Learning What Her Ancestors Knew

What happened next is the core of the survival story — and it is also the core of the larger story about Indigenous adaptation, because what Ada Blackjack did over the following months was essentially a solo crash course in the knowledge her Iñupiat ancestors had accumulated over thousands of years.

She had been raised by Methodist missionaries.

She had not been taught to hunt, to trap, to read sea ice, to build skin boats, or to do any of the things that Iñupiat survival required.