Sedna
Also known as: Nuliajuk (Netsilingmiut), Takannaaluk or Takanaaluk arnaaluk (Iglulik), Uinigumasuittuq (Iglulik, 'the one who did not want a husband'), Sassuma Arnaa (West Greenland, 'mother of the deep'), Arnarquagssaq (Greenland), Sanna / Sedna (Baffin Island)
Mythological Narrative
She has many names along different coasts: Sedna, Nuliajuk, Nerrivik, “the place where food is.” In the best-known sequence she marries a seabird disguised as a man. Her father comes by boat to rescue her, but when the bird raises a storm he throws his daughter overboard and cuts away the fingers gripping the gunwale. One joint becomes small seals, another bearded seals, and the last bones become walruses and whales. She sinks to the seabed and holds every huntable creature of the ocean in her keeping. Husband, father, and ending change from region to region, so Sedna is a family of related tellings rather than one name accepted throughout the Arctic.
When people violate rules governing hunting, meat, birth, or death, the offense becomes filth knotted into her hair. Fingerless, the Sea Woman cannot comb it; she withholds the animals, breathing holes fall silent, and hunger enters the camp. In darkness and drum sound an angakkuq travels beneath the sea, passes guardians and the dead, and combs, confesses, bargains, or fights until the animals are released. The myth makes subsistence a reciprocal covenant. People live by flesh, yet animals are never an unthinking storehouse. Every seal rising at the ice is something the Sea Woman has chosen, for a time, to let go.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## Many names, one great power
Across the Inuit Arctic there is a woman who lives at the bottom of the sea and keeps the sea mammals on which people depend. Her names differ by region, and so do her stories. Franz Boas recorded her as Sedna in Cumberland Sound, Baffin Island, in the 1880s, and that is the name most outsiders know; the Netsilingmiut call her Nuliajuk; in Iglulik she is Takannaaluk and, in the telling of elders interviewed for Nunavut Arctic College, Uinigumasuittuq, "the one who did not want a husband"; in West Greenland she is Sassuma Arnaa, "mother of the deep". This site uses "Sedna" only as the most widely recognised name.
## How she came to the sea
The stories of her origin vary. In Boas's Baffin Island account she is a young woman who refuses every suitor, is lured away by a fulmar disguised as a man, and is rescued by her father, who, when the fulmar raises a storm, throws her into the sea and cuts off her fingers as she clings to the boat; the joints become the whales, seals, and ground seals. In other tellings, including one Boas also recorded, she marries a dog. Among the Netsilingmiut, as Rasmussen recorded, Nuliajuk is an orphan girl whom no one wants, pushed off a raft of kayaks during a crossing; her fingers are cut as she holds on, and she sinks to become the mother of the sea animals. The different beginnings lead to the same place: a woman wronged, maimed, and enthroned beneath the sea.
## Keeper of the animals
Because she has no fingers, she cannot comb her own hair. When people break the rules that govern relations with animals and with birth and death, the misdeeds gather in her hair as dirt and tangles, and she keeps the animals back, so that hunters come home empty-handed. In the Iglulik accounts recorded by Rasmussen, an angakkuq travels in spirit to her house at the bottom of the sea, combs and cleans her hair, and persuades her to release the animals, and people confess the breaches that caused the trouble.
## Today
The Sea Woman remains one of the most widely told Inuit stories and one of the most frequent subjects of Inuit art, from Cape Dorset prints to contemporary sculpture. Many Inuit tellers stress her dignity and the justice of her anger; she is not a monster but the guardian of a relationship between people and animals that must be kept.
Cross-Pantheon Parallels & Archetypes
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Sedna.
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