Blair Braverman

She's cheerful.

It's like nothing ever happened.

So what did happen?

Because this dominates their first period of time on the island.

There's a journalist named Jennifer Niven who's written a book called Ada Blackjack.

And she worked closely with Ada's family.

Her suggestion that she puts forward in the book is that Ada had something called Arctic Hysteria, which is what's called a culture-bound syndrome.

That means it's a disease that only shows up in a specific culture.

Arctic hysteria shows up mainly in Inuit women in the winter when they've moved somewhere farther north than where they lived before.

And historically, the symptoms sound a lot like what Ada was going through.

There's social withdrawal.

There's saying and doing inappropriate, sometimes sexual and romantic things and disappearing out into the snow, just wandering off.

I was reading more about this.

It may be that this is the explanation, but there's also a lot of debate about whether Arctic hysteria really exists because there aren't that many recorded incidents.

And the main incidents that have been recorded are white people sort of quote unquote diagnosing Native women after they come into their communities and die.

throw everything off and are exploiting them.

There's a guy named Dr. Lawrence Kiermaier, who is the director of a program on transcultural psychiatry at McGill University.

And he said, quote, psychiatric case description transformed a situation of sexual exploitation of Inuit women by explorers into a discrete disorder worthy of a new diagnostic label.

Hmm.

With hindsight, we can see how insensitivity to the impact of exploration on other people's distorted the picture when vital information on social context was not included.