The knowledge that kept Iñupiat communities alive for thousands of years in the Arctic is also the knowledge that climate scientists now recognize as essential for understanding what is happening to the Arctic as the planet warms.

The people who know the Arctic best — who have the deepest observational record, the most sensitive perceptual systems, the most detailed understanding of what normal looks like and how what is happening now differs from it — are the people whose ancestors solved the Arctic survival problem before European explorers arrived to struggle with it.

Ada Blackjack survived Wrangel Island.

She came home to her son.

She lived the rest of her life in Alaska — quietly, in the northern places where her people had always lived.