Their refusal was not timidity.

It was informed judgment.

Ada Blackjack was at the dock almost by accident.

She had come looking for wages.

Born Ada Deletuk in 1898 in the tiny Iñupiat settlement of Spruce Creek, Alaska, she had been sent to Nome by her mother at around age eight after her father died from food poisoning.

Methodist missionaries raised her, teaching her to read English, cook, sew, and practice the domestic skills of the mission world.

What they did not teach her — what she had been deliberately separated from — was the traditional Iñupiat knowledge of hunting, trapping, navigating sea ice, reading weather, and surviving the northern winter.