Sedna

Sedna is the most widely attested deity across the many regional variants of Inuit religious tradition, ruling the sea and its creatures from her home in Adlivun, the undersea realm beneath the waters, and holding direct power over the seals, walruses and whales that Inuit hunting communities have historically depended on for food, clothing, fuel and tools. Origin narratives recorded across Inuit communities describe Sedna as a young woman whose father, fleeing a storm at sea he blamed on her, cut off her fingers as she clung to the side of his kayak, and it is from these severed fingers, sinking into the water, that the various sea mammals are said to have been born, permanently binding Sedna's own suffering to the material abundance the sea provides.

Because Sedna both rules the dead in Adlivun and controls the animals essential to survival, correct conduct, respect for hunting taboos, and proper treatment of the animals killed are understood in traditional belief as directly affecting her disposition and, through her, the actual availability of game, making her one of the clearest examples anywhere of a deity whose favour is understood in explicitly practical, subsistence terms.

Sedna is the name most widely known outside Inuit communities, popularised through nineteenth and twentieth-century ethnographic recording, but Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, the traditional Inuit knowledge documented by contemporary Inuit scholars and elders, records a range of regional names for essentially the same figure across the Arctic, including Nuliajuk and Taleelayu among others, reflecting genuine linguistic and cultural diversity across Inuit communities from Alaska to Greenland rather than a single uniform tradition, even though the goddess's core story and function, mutilated origin, rule of the sea and its creatures, and direct link between human conduct and hunting success, recur with strong consistency wherever she appears. Traditional practice assigned the angakkuq, the shaman, a central role in managing the relationship with Sedna, undertaking ritual journeys to her undersea home specifically to comb and untangle her hair, matted and fouled by the accumulated wrongdoing of the community, when taboo violations were believed to be causing scarcity, a ritual duty that made maintaining right relationship with Sedna an ongoing, actively managed community responsibility rather than a matter settled once through her origin story alone.