The Mosaics of an Arctic Seamstress: Narrative Versions of Ada Blackjack on Wrangel Island, 1921–1923

Abstract

This essay focuses on the narrative mosaics of Iñupiat Alaskan Ada Delutuk Blackjack, hired seamstress on an occupation colony on Wrangel Island in 1921–23, organized by renowned Canadian Arctic explorer and writer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. While the venture resulted in the tragic deaths of Blackjack’s four companions on the island, she became the expedition’s sole survivor and kept a diary during the last months of her stay. I read Blackjack’s narrative self-representation against some of the characteristics given to her in Stefansson’s official account of the expedition, The Adventure of Wrangel Island, highlighting differences in the two texts. Blackjack’s achievement is a disturbing element in Stefansson’s theory of the superior Arctic adaptability of the educated western male and his evolutionary understanding of the history of polar exploration. Her diary is a taciturn story of events on the island, of both drama and triumph in an environment of extreme isolation. By focusing on some of the narrative elements that form Blackjack’s characteristic perception of her surroundings, it is possible to read her autoethnograpic and pluralistic narrative self-representation as a key feature of her narrative Indigeneity.