Sedna (the Sea Woman)

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.