In Alaska, this system operated through both government schools and the missionary schools that the federal government authorized and supported.

Ada Blackjack’s education at the Methodist mission in Nome was precisely this system in operation.

The missionaries taught her English, domestic skills, Western cooking, and Christian values.

They did not teach her to hunt, to process animal skins, to read sea ice, or to do any of the things that Iñupiat traditional knowledge encompassed.

The deliberate suppression of Indigenous knowledge in Alaska occurred during the same period when Iñupiat and other Alaska Native communities were facing major ecological disruptions: the collapse of the bowhead whale population from commercial whaling, the depletion of caribou herds, the introduction of new diseases for which Native communities had no immunity.

The convergence of ecological disruption and cultural suppression created what historians and anthropologists have described as a perfect storm for the dissolution of Indigenous communities.