Sedna, Mistress of the Sea

Recorded in numerous regional variants across Inuit communities from Greenland to Alaska, this narrative most often begins with a young woman who refuses all suitors, or who is deceived into marrying a bird-spirit disguised as a handsome man and taken far from her family. When her father, sometimes alone and sometimes with other kin, sets out by boat either to rescue her or, in other versions, simply to take her back out to sea after a quarrel, a storm rises, and in fear for their own survival, or in anger, the father throws his daughter over the side of the boat.

As she clings desperately to the gunwale, refusing to let go, her father cuts off her fingers joint by joint to force her into the water; each severed joint transforms as it falls, becoming in different tellings the seals, walrus, and whales that Inuit hunters depend on, so that the animals of the sea come into being directly from her suffering and dismemberment. She sinks to the ocean floor, unable to return to her family or the world above, and becomes a powerful spirit ruling over the very creatures her own body created in the act of being cast away.

The story is recorded in strikingly similar form across a huge geographic range of Inuit and related Arctic communities, with regional variation chiefly in the details of how the betrayal begins and in the spirit's name, which supports reading the Sedna narrative as a genuinely widespread and ancient element of Arctic religious life rather than a story confined to any single community or recent in origin.

Now dwelling at the bottom of the sea, Sedna, known by many different names depending on the community, including Nuliajuk and Arnakuaggsaq among others, is understood to control whether hunters succeed or starve, since the sea mammals will not release themselves to be hunted if she is angry, most often because human wrongdoing, particularly the breaking of taboos surrounding the treatment of animals or the dead, has tangled or dirtied her long hair, which she cannot comb herself since her fingers were cut away in the original betrayal.

To restore good hunting, a shaman, an angakkuq, must undertake a dangerous spirit journey down to Sedna's undersea house, calm her, and comb and braid her hair, in a ritual documented in detail by the Danish Greenlandic explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen during the Fifth Thule Expedition of the 1920s, one of the most extensive ethnographic surveys of Inuit religious life ever conducted across the Canadian Arctic. The myth functions simultaneously as an origin account for marine mammals, a moral framework tying good or bad hunting fortune directly to proper human conduct, and a justification for the angakkuq's specialized ritual role as the one person able to travel to Sedna and negotiate on the community's behalf, making the story inseparable in practice from the religious specialists whose authority it explains and sustains.