Polar Bear Son handcrafted linocut print. I love how this design includes a story-book magical folktale feel, with the theme of circularity, reciprocity and interdependence captured by the embrace between the polar bear and elderly woman. I feel like I am forever aiming to recreate something like this with every subsequent creation, and often I fall short!
Polar Bear Son, is inspired by a timeless heartwarming Inuit* folktale about an elderly childless woman who finds a lost polar bear cub and raises him as her own. When she grows too old to look after herself, he brings her food. This is such a charming story of reciprocity, interdependence and mutual thriving.
I love how this folktale shows us that mutually beneficial relationships require a consistent and passionate tending to. In other words, we have make the effort to cultivate them. However, in reality today the labor of tending to relational harmony is often invisible, it frequently gets relegated to women, and we don’t often recognize the enormous amount of work and skill that goes into it. . . . whether this means not over harvesting wild foraged foods so there will be an abundance in the future, or taking only resources you need so future generations will still have some, or doing the hard labor of bridging our differences and finding our way back into relationship with each other human-to-human. Though it is an ancient folktale, it speaks of a skill we could still put into practice more even today.
Sketches and designs, prior to carving.
In fact, thinking in a more ecological way, 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.
Starting to carve out the seals and fish…
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.
I absolutely love how the folktale acknowledges and celebrates the elder woman as the one who quietly, yet fiercely, subverts the relationship between hunter and prey. She slowly tends and cares, until the relationship grows so that it is mutually beneficial. It is truly a story that cherishes the wisdom of being ancient, elder and old while at the same time celebrates the deep and intimate relationship humans can have with this precious, extraordinary, beautiful earth if we follow the wisdom of this wise elder and start doing the hard work of tending.
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.
Folktales about reciprocity between humans and more-than-human worlds weave their way through many cultures under different names (one example is Sky Woman, a Haudenosaunee Creation story of reciprocity, retold by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her bestselling book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants). I believe these stories collectively reveal how reciprocity is an ancient and shared human value, a thread of connection that has been deeply buried and hidden from us due to divisive history telling that favors borderlines over relationship building. Through the age-old craft of hand carving and hand printing I hope to bring more visibility to this cohesive planetary love story to meet our vital human need to re-story ourselves back into relationship with the wild.
*I first learned of Polar Bear son through Lydia Dabcovich’s retelling of it in her children’s book Polar Bear Son. However, I understand she learned about it through “The Bear Story,” collected directly from the Inuit and transcribed by German-American scholar Franz Boas, often called “the father of American anthropology.” I have since searched for an Inuit version of the story because I truly believe that it is important to hear and acknowledge this story as it is originally told from the voice of someone who self-identifies as Inuit, but have not yet found one, but want to acknowledge how grateful I am for the wisdom the story has offered me even in its retelling, and to acknowledge how much I don’t know because I am learning about it second hand through the filter of my own cultural lense.
References:
Chakour, Vanessa (2021). Awakening Artemis: Deepening Intimacy with the Living Earth and Reclaiming our Wild Nature. London: Penguin Life.
Dabkovich, Lydia (1999). Polar Bear Son: An Inuit Tale. Clarion Books.
Blog post cover image photo credit: Erik Karits on Pexels
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