It is inherently difficult to quantify the benefits accruing to Inuit, either as provisioners or recipients, from involvement in subsistence. In point of fact, subsistence is a system of economy in which the resources used and received – food, snowmobiles, ammunition or money (real or imputed) – are at once material and also analogs for a web of social relationships.
Here the focus has been on how some of the monies earned through sport hunt employment by a number of Clyde River Inuit are transformed into what are normally thought to be the “stuff” of subsistence, variously seal and caribou meat and maktaaq. However, whether this is expressed as kilograms of edible biomass or the cost of an equivalent amount of imported food, it at best only partially touches on the role of guided polar bear sport hunting and subsistence. Not touched upon, for instance, is that the sport hunt provides younger men with an opportunity, in the role of hunt assistants [12], to gain important knowledge and experience in the company of highly skilled community members. In that a young hunter may, as noted earlier, only be able through the permit lottery to actually hunt a polar bear once in a decade, this training is invaluable.
The economy approach adopted here is in no small way a poor means for capturing the cultural importance of polar bear for Inuit and of the role that sport conservation-hunting plays has in subsistence production at Clyde River. However, it does serve to illuminate two aspects of the sport hunt in relation to modern Inuit subsistence.