Search

The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is a common pool resource that contributes to both the subsistence and monetary aspects of the Nunavut mixed economy through its use as food, the sale of hides in the fur trade, and sport hunt outfitting. Sport hunting is more financially profitable than subsistence hunting; however, the proportion of the polar bear quota devoted to the sport hunt has become relatively stable at approximately 20% across Nunavut. This ratio suggests local Inuit organizations are not using a neoclassical economic model based on profit maximization. This paper examines local-level hunting organizations and their institutions (as sets of rules) governing the sport and Inuit subsistence hunts from both formalist and substantivist economic perspectives. It concludes that profit maximization is used within the sport hunting sphere, which fits a neoclassical model of economic rationality. A second and parallel system, better viewed through the substantivist perspective, demonstrates that the communities focus on longer-term goals to maintain and reproduce the socio-economic system of the subsistence economy, which is predicated on maintaining social, human-environment, and human- polar bear relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presently, the terms "settlement" and "community" are used virtually interchange- ably as identifying referents for contemporary Inuit residential places, especially those that are the result of past Euro-Canadian resettlement policy. This paper revisits Chang's (1961) conceptualization of these terms in which "settlement" expresses spatial, geographic and, to a degree, temporal provenience, while "community" is conceived of as having strict social meaning with regard to place. Chang's conception of each term is tested through examination of ethnohistoric information about Inuit occupation and use of the Clyde region of eastern Baffin Island before the formation of modern Clyde Rivet This examination begins with historical and informant information about the nineteenth century regional presence of Inuit and then is followed by detailed Inuit memories of people and places during Clyde's Contact-Traditional Period (ca. 1923-1970). It concludes that Chang's discriminating use of "settlement" and "community" are relevant to the history of Inuit occupation in this area during this later time, but that his formulations about Inuit settlement and community within his larger circumpolar typologies are weak and with regard to community inaccurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a detailed study of animal bones from a Late Dorset house structure and midden at the Bell site, Victoria Island. Previous research has shown seal to be the staple resource of Late Dorset subsistence in most other regions. Bones of terrestrial mammals such as caribou are rarely found in Late Dorset sites, leading researchers to suggest that Late Dorset people may not have been actively hunting caribou or that caribou population numbers were low during the Late Dorset period across much of the eastern Arctic. In contrast to other sites, faunal remains from the Bell site indicate that Late Dorset people living there were primarily dependent on caribou and Arctic char, and relied only minimally on seal. Thus, the Bell site presents a rare opportunity to understand terrestrial aspects of the Late Dorset economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On April 1, 1999 one-fifth of Canada's landmass became Nunavut, a new Arctic territory in which eighty-five percent of the population of 28,000 is Inuit. In this paper, I explore how overlapping vocabularies of nationalism and citizenship, so successful in external negotiations with the Canadian state, were brought home and utilized to defend competing positions in the internal debate over a unique proposal that would have ensured gender parity in Nunavut's territorial legislature. The gender parity debate is analyzed to illustrate the way that different political actors mobilized the concepts of nationalism and citizenship to support competing positions and how these two discourses influenced notions of the spaces in which gender difference can be acknowledged legitimately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]