Blackjack, Ada, 1898-1983

Ada Delutuk Blackjack was born on May 10, 1898 in the Iñupiat village of Spruce Creek, in what was then known as the District of Alaska. Her mother sent her to Nome when she was eight years old. There, Methodist missionaries taught her to read, write, and sew. Also called Ada Blackjack Johnson, she married, had children with, and divorced a man named Johnson. Far from home and without money, she was forced to place their only surviving son, Bennett, in an orphanage and found work as a seamstress.

In 1921, Ada Blackjack was hired to join an expedition to Wrangel Island (in the Chukchi Sea north of Siberia), which was in the area homelands where her ancestors had lived since time immemorial. Financed by Vilhjalmur Stefansson who had hoped to establish a territorial claim on the island, the ill-fated expedition resulted in the deaths of Blackjack's four fellow explorers.

As the only survivor of the expedition, she mastered her environment through sewing, hunting, and other skills until being rescued in 1923. Blackjack later died in 1983 at the age of 85.