Anauta Blackmore
{{Infobox person
| name = Anauta Blackmore
| image = Anauta the only Eskimo woman on the American platform.jpg
| alt = A flyer showing a woman dressed in Inuit costume
| caption = 1940s flyer advertising Blackmore's lectures
| birth_name = Sarah Elizabeth Ford
| birth_date = c. 1890
| birth_place = Baffin Island
| death_date = {{death date|1965|01|13}}
| death_place = Ashland, Kansas
| nationality =
| other_names = Lizzie Ford Blackmore
| occupation = author and lecturer
| years_active = 1929–1965
| known_for =
| notable_works = Land of the Good Shadows
}}
Anauta Blackmore ({{circa|1890}}–1965), also known as Lizzie Ford Blackmore, was an Arctic author, memoirist and lecturer.{{cite book |last1=Thompson |first1=Donald Eugene |title=Indiana authors and their books 1917–1966; A continuation of Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816–1916, and containing additional names from the earlier period. |date=1974 |publisher=Wabash College |page=54 |url=https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inauthors/view?docId=encyclopedia/VAA5365-02.xml;chunk.id=ina-v2-entry-0211;toc.depth=1;toc.id=ina-v2-entry-0211;brand=ia-books;doc.view=0;query=&text1=ollah&field1=text&hit.rank=#}} She is best known for her 1940 autobiography, Land of the Good Shadows, which may be the first book-length autobiography of an Inuk.{{cite book |last1=McGrath |first1=Robin |last2=Jenness |first2=Diamond |title=Canadian Inuit Literature: The Development of a Tradition |date=1984 |publisher=National Museums of Canada |page=85 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jZpkAAAAMAAJ |language=en}} Blackmore claimed to have Inuit ancestry, although it's unclear if this was true.{{cite book |last1=Considine |first1=John |title=Adventuring in Dictionaries: New Studies in the History of Lexicography |date=12 October 2010 |publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing |isbn=978-1-4438-2626-6 |pages=282–284 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kJcnBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA283 |language=en}}
Early life
She was born Sarah Elizabeth Ford on Baffin Island in about 1890.{{cite thesis |degree=PhD |publisher=Dalhousie University |last1=Crooks |first1=Katherine |title=Cold Comforts: Women Making Inuit and Qallunaat Homes in the Eastern Arctic and North American Cultures of Exploration, 1890-1940 |date=October 2020 |pages=173–223 |url=https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/79954/Crooks-Katherine-PhD-HIST-October-2020.pdf?sequence=3}} Her father was George (or Yorgke) Ford, who worked for the Hudson's Bay Company as an interpreter. In Blackmore's recounting, her mother was an Inuk woman, although company archives suggest her mother was from Newfoundland and died around 1905.
She married her cousin, trading-post manager William R. Ford, with whom she had two daughters, but was widowed in August 1913 when Ford drowned. After this she spent some time in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Montreal, Quebec, and Detroit, Michigan, before settling in Indianapolis, Indiana, around 1920. Here she married construction contractor Harry Blackmore.
Career in America
In Indianaopolis, she met Indianapolis Star cartoonist Chic Jackson who, around 1929, helped her establish herself on the lecture circuit. She embraced her Inuit name, Anauta, was advertised as "the only Eskimo woman on the American
platform", and spoke about her life experience in the eastern Arctic.
In 1940, Blackmore collaborated with American children's writer Heluiz Chandler Washburne to write an autobiography, Land of the Good Shadows: The Life Story of Anauta, an Eskimo Woman, published by John Day Company. The story was certainly embellished for a white audience, with Blackmore claiming to have been adopted and raised by an Inuk woman. She would go on to write two more books, Children of the Blizzard (1952), a collection of stories of Inuit children, and Wild Like the Foxes: The True Story of an Eskimo Girl (1956), a biography of her mother.{{cite book |last1=Bataille |first1=Gretchen M. |last2=Lisa |first2=Laurie |title=Native American Women: A Biographical Dictionary |date=16 December 2003 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-135-95587-8 |page=13 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9eaSAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA13 |language=en}}
Blackmore died of a heart attack on 13 January 1965 in Ashland, Kansas, where she had been engaged to lecture.{{cite news |title=Anauta dies of heart-attack in Kansas town |url=https://www.newspapers.com/image/44697344 |work=The Kokomo Tribune |agency=Associated Press |date=15 January 1965 |page=7}}
References
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Category:Writers from the Northwest Territories
Category:Writers from Indianapolis
Category:20th-century Canadian memoirists
Category:20th-century American memoirists
Category:20th-century Canadian women writers
Category:20th-century American women writers
Category:Canadian people who self-identify as being of Indigenous descent