| Anauta Blackmore | |
| Birth Name: | Sarah Elizabeth Ford |
| Birth Date: | c. 1890 |
| Birth Place: | Baffin Island |
| Death Place: | Ashland, Kansas |
| Other Names: | Lizzie Ford Blackmore |
| Occupation: | author and lecturer |
| Years Active: | 1929–1965 |
| Notable Works: | Land of the Good Shadows |
Anauta Blackmore (–1965), also known as Lizzie Ford Blackmore, was an Arctic author, memoirist and lecturer.[1] She is best known for her 1940 autobiography, Land of the Good Shadows, which may be the first book-length autobiography of an Inuk.[2] Blackmore claimed to have Inuit ancestry, although it's unclear if this was true.[3]
She was born Sarah Elizabeth Ford on Baffin Island in about 1890.[3] [4] Her father was George (or Yorgke) Ford, who worked for the Hudson's Bay Company as an interpreter.[3] In Blackmore's recounting, her mother was an Inuit woman, although company archives suggest her mother was from Newfoundland and died around 1905.[3]
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.[1] [4] After this she spent some time in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Montreal, Quebec, and Detroit, Michigan, before settling in Indianapolis, Indiana, around 1920.[1] Here she married construction contractor Harry Blackmore.[1] [4]
In Indianaopolis, she met Indianapolis Star cartoonist Chic Jackson who, around 1929, helped her establish herself on the lecture circuit.[1] She embraced her Inuit name, Anauta, was advertised as "the only Eskimo woman on the Americanplatform", and spoke about her life experience in the eastern Arctic.[4]
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.[4] The story was certainly embellished for a white audience, with Blackmore claiming to have been adopted and raised by an Inuk woman.[4] 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.[5]
Blackmore died of a heart attack on 13 January 1965 in Ashland, Kansas, where she had been engaged to lecture.[1] [6]