When the United States government established a network of boarding schools for Alaska Native children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — schools designed, like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School that shaped the broader pattern, to systematically replace Indigenous identity and knowledge with Western Christian values and practices — this was the knowledge they were trying to erase.

Ada Blackjack’s mother had sent her to Nome and into mission education.

The missionaries had separated her from the traditional knowledge of her people.

When she arrived on Wrangel Island in 1921, she did not know how to hunt, trap, or build skin boats.

But something remained.

And under the pressure of survival in the environment where that knowledge had been developed and perfected, she found it.

The Aftermath — What She Got And What She Didn’t