Inuit Polar Bear Hunt
Combines Old & New

Associated Press
Posted April 4, 2003

Since its mergence into Canada, Nunavut has been witnessing a conundrum between old values and new realities on nanniaq, or polar bear hunt. A legacy passed down over centuries, nanniaq is a traditional way of life for the Inuit, but the past over-harvesting invokes the concern of government. Maintain the practice or accept the reality?

Brush the snow off your caribou skin parka quickly, she warns, and don't push yourself too fast or hard. Excessive sweat, or a glaze of ice caused by body heat, almost any kind of moisture, can be deadly in this Arctic cold.

And Meeka Mike has other essential advice: The pack ice must be strong enough out near the water to support dog sleds or snowmobiles. Polar bears are at home there - but dunking means death for polar bear hunters.

These are lessons passed down by her Inuit ancestors over centuries of surviving the harshest of environments. Now times are changing and the Inuit, known as Eskimos down south, are adapting.

Their barren homeland became a Canadian territory, Nunavut, in 1999 to give them more say in their affairs. While they head the government and slowly assume a bigger role in the increasingly developed economy, many like Meeka blend modern life with traditional ways.

That means hunting seal and caribou for food and skins, and going out in the dead of winter in search of nanuq, the polar bear.

A successful hunt links them to their heritage of conquering the elements and the world's largest land carnivore, an ivory beast weighing up to 675 kilograms.

They do it for the meat, which goes to their families and friends and elders, and the hide, which makes pants or parkas. Mostly, though, they do it to because that's what the Inuit always have done.

Instead of dog teams, Meeka and fellow hunters Joshua Kango and Lew Philip drive snowmobiles, with plastic tarps securing wooden food boxes, synthetic equipment bags, caribou hide blankets, ropes and tuuq, a spear-like ice chisel. Rather than the bear harpoon of old, each has a high-caliber rifle.

Joshua and Lew, both in their 50s, have hunted bear together for more than a decade, using skills learned from an uncle when they were children. For Meeka, 36, this is the first nanniaq, or polar bear hunt, though she has had a lifetime of seal and caribou hunting. She won't kill a bear this trip because she wants that event to be by dog sled, like her grandfather and his father.

In their fur-lined, insulated parkas and pants, with sealskin or modern boots up to their knees and gloves of wolf or beaver, they look much like their ancestors.

Polar bears generally roam for food at night or daybreak and sleep in the afternoon. Hunting them involves scanning wide expanses of ice for bears or their tracks, then working in teams to trap them on the ice between the open water and the shore.

This time, Lew came across a sleeping female, about 5 years old, along the shore ice near Tonglait, a smattering of cabins 193 kilometers southeast of Iqaluit. It awoke and ran, but he brought it down with a shot from his 25.06-caliber rifle. A few hours later, the gamy aroma of fresh bear meat and chunks of fat bubbling on the stove fills a small cabin as the wind whistles outside.

"We're not looking for a big bear. We're not hunting for the money," Lew says after gorging himself on what tastes like the richest of pot roasts. "We feel good when we hunt the polar bear."

To the Inuit, polar bears have special significance. This archetypal symbol of the majesty and threat of the Arctic graces the government logo and license plates of Nunavut.

Nanuq can outrun, outclimb and outswim a man, prompting an Inuit saying that "the only thing they can't do is fly."

Most of Canada's polar bears are in the territory three times the size of Texas that stretches from Greenland to the Arctic Ocean.

Once hunted year-round, they now are a "species of special concern" due to past over-harvesting, which rose with the introduction of snowmobiles, and environmental threats such as global warming.

The Nunavut Wildlife Management Board sets a yearly hunting quota; it was 408 for last season, though just 385 bears were killed. Most went to subsistence hunters, but 69 were shot by foreign sport hunters who pay US$20,000 or more apiece.

The controls are working, say Nunavut officials, who question warnings that the polar bear could face extinction due to global warming's reduction of the shelf ice where they hunt.

One study of a small polar bear population in the western Hudson Bay region far to the southwest found the animals were smaller with less fat, but it's premature to extrapolate those findings to Arctic populations, says Markus Dyck, a polar bear technician with the Nunavut Department of Sustainable Development.

"To raise awareness to the public, that's OK, but to suggest that polar bears face extinction without knowing and understanding the complexities of long-term climate change and ecosystem dynamics is somewhat of a misleading statement," he said.

Inuit hunters believe nanuq is alive and well, its numbers increasing.

Meeka calls the quota a concession to environmental groups that have pressured Western governments to protect the species.

The best regulator, she says, is the traditional Inuit philosophy of taking only what is needed.

Today's economic reality in the Arctic is sky-high costs for equipment and fuel and pelt prices just starting to recover from the international anti-fur lobby of the 1970s. Tough times make it difficult for some Inuit to follow the old ways, rather than hunt commercially.

"That is something a lot of Inuit struggle with - should I not sell and see my family go hungry, or should I sell?" Meeka says.

Associated Press

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