From Lady Jane Franklin to #TradWife: gender, race, and class in colonial complicity in the North American High North

White supremacy's entanglement with gender and class in North America shaped legacies of policies and dynamics toward ordering individuals in hierarchies of desirability. In so-called Canada and the USA, colonial complicity by white women reflects ideals of womanhood intertwined with whiteness and expected roles within the workforce and bourgeoisie. Justifications of settlement and eradication of Indigenous peoples relied on racial superiority using white femininity as a symbol of a Manifest Destiny. The article argues that Lady Jane Franklin's, Louise Arner Boyd's, and Sarah Palin's instrumentalization of their societal positions show the evolution of how race, class, and gender are articulated within the racial-patriarchal-colonial myth-making of the Arctic : from an Angel in the House serving the memory of a British Navy officer ; to an Arctic Diana self-funding her scientific expeditions and collaborating with the government during war; to normalization by claiming nativeness to the land. Palin, Franklin, and Boyd are elite white women who served the crafting of the Arctic within this imperial colonial realm. They operated a carefully well-thought-out strategy balancing the reality of the societal structure in which they lived and live in with their interests and ambitions - embodying the site of contestation between agency and structure.