Ada Blackjack had survived on Wrangel Island with partial access to knowledge the mission schools had tried to take from her.

The communities she came from were working, decades later, to make sure that partial access wouldn’t be the best case scenario for the next generation.

The Scientific Validation — What Western Research Eventually Confirmed

In the decades following the Wrangel Island expedition, multiple strands of Western scientific research eventually arrived at conclusions that Iñupiat traditional knowledge had already encoded.

On nutrition: research in the mid-twentieth century confirmed that raw and minimally cooked marine mammal products contained sufficient vitamin C to prevent scurvy — explaining why Iñupiat populations eating traditional diets did not develop scurvy while European Arctic explorers consistently did.

Studies of traditional Arctic diets documented that muktuk (beluga and bowhead whale skin and blubber) contained vitamin C at levels that, combined with fresh seal meat and other traditional foods, provided adequate nutrition for Arctic survival.