1 The standardized English spelling of Paulatuk is employed by federal, territorial, regional, and municipal government bodies to describe the hamlet. However, locally, Paulatuuqmiut prefer the use of the Siglitun spelling, Paulatuuq, in describing the community. Throughout this chapter I employ Paulatuuq when referring to the community, but where I refer to governance bodies that employ the English spelling of the hamlet’s name, I employ the –uk suffix.

2 See Inuvialuit Joint Secretariat (2003). This report, which collects the results of annual harvest studies over a period of ten years, includes a detailed discussion of methods in section 3 of its introduction. According to section 3.3, “Harvesters (hunters) were initially defined as Inuvialuit male persons sixteen years of age and over, residing in the IRS [Inuvialuit Settlement Region]. Exceptions were made for female heads of households who hunted, or women or younger children who specifically requested to report to the survey individually” (2003, 7). This is, however, the sole mention of women in the report.

3 More broadly, Usher and Wenzel (1997, 146–47) note that statistical tracking has traditionally relied heavily on information generated by various reporting requirements and from records pertaining to the issuance of hunting and fishing permits. As they point out, however, whereas Aboriginal peoples engage in hunting and fishing primarily for purposes of subsistence, “rarely are there any systems in place to track subsistence harvests” (146). Similarly, because the right of Aboriginal peoples to hunt and fish rests on their original title to land (as recognized by treaty or through comprehensive land claims), licensing records do not capture their participation in these activities. Although the Inuvialuit Harvest Study was clearly designed to provide statistics about subsistence harvesting, its methods suggest that women’s participation in these activities still largely remains under the radar.

4 In this connection, one also thinks of Bernard Saladin d’Anglure’s work on Inuit cosmologies, according to which gender is conceived not in terms of a duality but as tripartite. Saladin d’Anglure (2005) identifies a “third gender,” which “straddled the boundary between two others and fulfilled a mediatory function between them” (134). Although figures belonging to this third gender frequently appear in mythological narratives, the category is very much a part of living social relations.