Polar Bear Son, 18” x 24” linocut.
Polar Bear Son, by Lydia Dabcovich, is a touching story inspired by an ancient Inuit folktale about an elderly childless woman who finds a lost polar bear cub and raises him as her own. When he grows up she can no longer look after herself, so he brings her food. Most people may think of Polar Bear Son as a nice touching story about traditional Inuit lifestyle from another time and era, but do not see how it can resonate with their everyday lives today.
Sketches and designs, prior to carving.
In fact, it is easy to become disconnected from the reality of how dependent we are on the wild for our survival. With the disappearance of bees for example, we have reduced crop success, threatening our food supply. We may not think of the bees as our family members, and yet like the Polar Bear in this Inuit tale, they clearly do pollinate crops that literally feed us.
The soil on a farm includes thousands and thousands of beetles, springtails, mites, earth worms, spiders, ants, nematodes and other organisms that engineer pathways for rainwater, provides nutrients for plants and break down of organic matter from previous crops to make the soil fertile. Larger predators like snakes and coyotes hunt for rodents and other pests on farm that may otherwise overtake and eat all the crops.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but there is so much depth and truth to Polar Bear Son that we can relate to our lives today even though we are not hunter-gatherers, we simply have to pay attention to the roles these creatures are already playing in our agricultural system and we can see the same story taking place.
Starting to carve out the seals and fish…
The artist’s linoleum with the first layer of black ink applied before printing.
Vanessa Charkour, herbalist and environmental activist, writes in her book Awakening Artemis: Deepening Intimacy with the Living Earth and Reclaiming our Wild Nature (2021), that the media infiltrates us with stories of doom and catastrophic climate change statistics when really what we need are more stories about our interconnection. She talks about the power of myths and folktales in shaping our psychology, what she calls "our inner ecology” and sense of identity in relationship to the wild. Our connection to Mother Earth is not out there to be discovered, but rather retrieved from the inside, because it is already within us and stories like Polar Bear Son help us to retrieve this precious sense of belonging. She says, “Ancient myths speak to our need for connection, share in our suffering, offer hope, and help to guide our moral compass. . . . Revisiting traditional tales across cultures reflects the fact that there are places - inside and outside of us - that are worthy of protecting, sanctifying, and remembering” (xi). Certainly Polar Bear Son, with its themes of interdependence and reciprocity between human and more-than-human worlds, is one of these stories that can reconnect us and remind us of our kinship with the wild.
This particular story is even more poignant today because of how vulnerable the polar bear population is given the current climate crisis. Due to ongoing and potential loss of their sea ice habitat from the warming of the planet, polar bears are now listed as a threatened species in the US under the Endangered Species Act (since May 2008). Polar bears normally rely heavily on sea ice as rest spots between traveling and hunting for food. However, as the sea ice recedes earlier in the spring and forms later in the fall, polar bears are increasingly spending longer periods on land where they have less frequent access to food, longer fasting periods and reduced capacity to nurse their cubs. Some scientists are saying polar bears could become nearly extinct by the end of the century as a result of shrinking sea ice in the Arctic if global warming continues.
Polar Bears are the largest bear in the world and the Arctic's top predator. They are a powerful symbol of the strength and endurance of the Arctic. The polar bear's Latin name, Ursus Maritimus, means "sea bear." Here I have carved out this majestic bear with the elderly woman in an embrace, along with the seals, fish and birds which they depended on each other to hunt for. I love the idea of connecting fur, fin feather and human in a unified whole and tried to capture this concept in the design. Along with reciprocity and interdependence, the story is also one about sacrifice for the beloved and the collective.
References:
Chakour, Vanessa (2021). Awakening Artemis: Deepening Intimacy with the Living Earth and Reclaiming our Wild Nature. London: Penguin Life.
Blog post cover image photo credit: Erik Karits on Pexels
Explore more folktale art
It is not only humans that tell stories. . . In the voice of bright white feathers and a charming black cap, a story darts its way through gusts of wind off the coast of Massachusetts hatching out of makeshift nests of pebbles and dry grasses. during the months of April and May. It is a seasonal story with themes of reciprocity and interdependence between the arctic tern, a migrating bird, and local coastal cloudberry flowers suggesting that even temporary guest can still contribute to a landscape’s thriving.