Sedna, Mother of the Sea

Across the Inuit world, from Greenland to Arctic Canada and Alaska, a great female being rules the sea and the creatures in it — most widely known by one Inuktitut name, Sedna, though she carries many names and many tellings. In the best-known version she was a young woman thrown from a boat into the sea; when she clung to the gunwale her fingers were cut off, and from the severed joints came the seals, the walruses and the whales. She sank to the sea floor to become the mistress of all marine animals.

Because she controls the sea-mammals on which Inuit life depended, she controls survival itself. When people break taboos, her hair grows tangled and filthy and she keeps the animals below, bringing hunger. It then falls to the angakkuq, the shaman, to make a spirit-journey down to her, to comb and braid her hair, and to persuade her to release the game once more.

The story encodes a whole ethic of the hunt — respect, restraint, and reciprocity between people and the animals they kill — and it varies from community to community across the Arctic, as living oral belief always does. Its fuller detail rightly stays with the Inuit who carry it.