Anguta vs Sedna (the Sea Woman)

In Baffin Island tellings recorded by Franz Boas, the Sea Woman's father, who cut off her fingers and now lives with her in Adlivun, carrying the dead to that dwelling.

Anguta belongs to the Baffin Island tellings of the Sea Woman recorded by Franz Boas in Cumberland Sound in the 1880s. Many other regional versions give the Sea Woman's father no name, or no afterlife role, or no part in the story at all, as in the Netsilik story of the orphan Nuliajuk. This site includes him because Boas's account is a major published source, not because he is found across the Inuit Arctic.

The woman at the bottom of the sea who keeps the seals, walrus, and whales, known by different names across the Arctic (Sedna on Baffin Island, Nuliajuk among the Netsilingmiut, Takannaaluk in Iglulik, Sassuma Arnaa in Greenland); when people break taboos, the animals are held back until an angakkuq combs her hair.

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.