Pauta and polar bears are inextricably linked in Inuit art, bound together in a way that is both personal and mythic. In Cape Dorset, there is a well-known story of the elderly Pauta offering food to a polar bear that had wandered into town. “I like to carve what I feel, not merely what I see,” Pauta reflected in an interview with George Swinton. “It is the feeling that goes along with whatever one is doing [...] I think and feel that the bear has a spirit to be put into the carving” [1].

This Roaring Polar Bear embodies that spirit fully. While Pauta became widely known for his “Dancing Bears,” those paradoxical creations where a fearsome predator becomes almost buoyant in its play, he also carved bears of an entirely different but no less majestic order. The latter type are works of solemn power, where the animal stands rooted and resolute, exuding its authority. The present sculpture belongs to this rarer tradition, with the limestone Polar Bear (1967), gifted by the City of Toronto to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, standing as another key work in this distinct tradition. Significantly, the present Roaring Polar Bear is the largest known example of Pauta’s polar bears, surpassed in scale only by the limestone Polar Bear. Like its limestone counterpart, the present Roaring Polar Bear conveys the solemn dignity of the entire species.

This formidable creature radiates monumental strength, its balance and poise conveying a sense of raw, elemental power. The bear’s wide-legged stance anchors it firmly to the earth, a foundation of primal energy that surges upward through its torso. The upward taper of its body draws the eye naturally toward the raised head, mouth agape in an ecstatic, defiant roar that one can practically hear. There is no hesitation in this posture. Only unyielding presence, and the sculptural weight of a creature caught in the full release of its strength.

Invariably, when standing before this work, one is reminded of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, lines that seem to echo in the bear’s roaring form:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

1. Driscoll, Uumajut, (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1985), p. 46.

ND