Featured Carved green soapstone bear - is this mark Inuit?

Mark on foot is indecipherable to me, doesn't look like roman letters or numbers, and the scratch through it makes it look like the mark is original to the piece, and not a price or owner mark added later. Does it mean anything?

 

Either EG or EL. Beyond that...dunno.

 

it could be an inuit bear...but the mark is a later sharpie add on....

@Mark London

 

Wonder if the mark could say ELY.......Just a thought.

 

Certainly a possibility. I think there's an Ely in Minnesota. Dunno about Alaska.

 

I won’t rule out the possibility of this being Inuit but I am inclined to think that it isn’t. The stone is uncommon, the signature is atypical, and frankly the subject just doesn’t look like a polar bear. More like a brown or black bear to my eyes.

 

Good point about not looking like a polar bear, but there are brown and black bear sculptures made by inuit, aren't there? These bears range certainly goes well into alaska. And I do see green soapstone inuit carvings, but maybe you mean the type of green soapstone?

Anyway, my hope was that the marks were inuit syllabics, but apparently not? (I haven't seen enough of the syllabics to know what I'm seeing - though I do have a couple carving with syllabics on them).

 

The eskimo...inuit peoples, live above the tree line.........
only bear there is Polar.........
I've never seen an Inuit carver....do a brown or black bear....
only the white one ...

 

I don't know the first thing about it but I think it's a very nice bear.

 

The OP's looks more like a black bear or a brown one than a polar bear.

 

Yeah, we're all agreed it is not a polar bear, but still clueless about who made it.

So I searched for an Inuit carved grizzly bear, and did find a few examples. Not a lot, and clearly *many* more polar bears than not. Similar, in my mind, to how oak secondary wood almost always points to English furniture and not American; but there are the exceptions that prove the rule. And the fact that grizzlies overlap with polar bears in a large part of their habitat means they are at least around (maps here: http://geology.com/stories/13/bear-areas/ and https://image.slidesharecdn.com/peo...peoples-of-the-arctic-4-728.jpg?cb=1222627676. One area is Baker Lake, which being inland seems to have a fair number of grizzlies. That said, I also found more example of grizzlies by native Dene artists, so that may be more likely than Inuit https://ammsa.com/publications/windspeaker/northern-art-mix-dene-and-inuit. Or of course, this may not be native or Canadian at all.

Thank you for the symbolics. Unfortunately I can't find any way to read the marks as symbolics, so I guess the marks will remain unexplained for now.

Here's one of the marked examples I found, by Mathew Aqiggaaq, 1981, https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/3328657_7028-hand-carved-inuit-grizzly-bear

Thanks for all the help, I learned a lot (still clearly have a lot to learn...)