Ada Blackjack: Lessons in Resilience
This book is one that I’m finally checking off my list after hearing about it from a client nearly a year ago. For those of you that don’t know, this story is about a young Inupiat woman that was contracted to join an ill-fated adventure to Wrangell island (the one off the coast of Russia, not the one in SE Alaska) as a seamstress to sew them clothing in the early 1920’s. Three of the four young men she went with disappeared when they tried to venture over the sea ice to get relief for their party. The fourth young man that was on the venture slowly succumbed to scurvy leaving Ada alone with dwindling food supplies. Upon her rescue, she tragically then faced manufactured scandals and racism from the media, the organizer of the expedition and her rescuer.
I think we learn a lot about the psychology of resilience when we read about survivors. Whether it’s adventure, trauma, POW, or wilderness survival, there is a lot of wisdom available for everyday living in the biographies and memoirs of those that face down long odds. This one is unique in the annals of arctic exploration because it is not about some narcissistic white guy trying to set a record. Instead the heroine is an indigenous woman, who needed to make money to care for her sick child. As I read through this biography, I took note of a few of Ada’s traits that I believe were key to her resilience as she survived in the arctic.
After Ada was in charge of her survival in earnest, she displayed a large capacity for thoughtful observation. She was constantly studying her environment and her problems and innovating solutions to better adapt to her circumstances. She taught herself how to trap and kept her companion and herself alive on the fruits of this endeavor for a long time. She also overcame her lack of knowledge about firearms to teach herself to shoot. Despite the immense weight of the rifle she had, she was able to improvise a way to support it with driftwood so that she could aim it at her quarry. As a lifelong outdoorsman that both traps and hunts, I can tell you that self-teaching these activities would be hard and difficult, yet Ada mastered them both on her own by being methodical and observant.
Sometimes when we’ve been beating our head against the same problem for too long, it behooves us to take a step back and study it for a while before we re-enter the arena for another round. Sometimes the simple action of allowing your brain to disengage from frustration frees your prefrontal cortex up enough to access your creativity. I think this was a big part of Ada’s success. She took her time, studied her problems and picked away at them a little at a time until she developed durable solutions to them.
The other quality aside from Ada’s observant creativity that helped her in her journey was her sense of purpose. This manifested in two ways: first in her sense of responsibility to make it home to raise her son Bennett whom she had to leave in the care of the hospital in Nome due to his tuberculosis. Secondly it manifested itself in her faith. As the book touches on excerpts in her diary, these two themes repeat in almost every entry reminding me of Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s search for meaning” where he states: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Ada’s deep connection to her faith was a comfort to her when the ships didn’t come on time to rescue her and her companion and when the polar bears were breaking into her supplies. Her sense of duty to get home and take care of her son energized her to keep pressing into her difficulties rather than allowing collapse to occur.
Virtue is cultivated in everyday interactions and proven by trials. A pastor once told me that the books you read and the people you spend time with are a good gauge for who you will be in 5 years. What resilient character traits do you admire in the people that you read about? How do you go about cultivating those virtues?
