The Sea Woman: Sedna, Nuliajuk, Takannaaluk

One story, many tellings

This is probably the most widely known Inuit story, and it is told differently in almost every region. What follows gives three published forms side by side rather than blending them into one: the Baffin Island telling Franz Boas recorded as the story of Sedna in the 1880s, the Netsilik telling of Nuliajuk that Knud Rasmussen recorded in the 1920s, and the Iglulik account of what an angakkuq must do when the Sea Woman withholds the animals. Iglulik elders interviewed by Nunavut Arctic College students in 1998 tell her story as that of Uinigumasuittuq, "the one who did not want a husband".

Baffin Island: the fulmar

In the version Boas recorded in Cumberland Sound, a young woman lives with her father and refuses every man who asks to marry her. In spring a fulmar flies to her from across the ice and sings to her, promising a warm house, soft skins, and plenty of food. She goes with him over the sea, and discovers that he has lied: she lives in a miserable tent of fish skins and eats only fish. After a year her father comes in his boat to visit, and when he sees how she lives he kills the fulmar and takes her away.

The other fulmars, mourning their companion, pursue the boat and raise a violent storm. The father, afraid for his life, throws his daughter overboard to appease them. She clings to the edge of the boat; he cuts off the first joints of her fingers, which fall into the sea and become whales; she holds on again, and the second joints become seals; the stumps become ground seals. The storm dies away, and the father lets her climb back in. Boas's account goes on to describe the daughter's revenge, the father's punishment, and all three, father, daughter, and dog, going down to Adlivun, where she is mistress.

Netsilik: the orphan girl

Among the Netsilingmiut the Sea Woman is Nuliajuk, and in the telling Rasmussen recorded she begins as an orphan girl whom no one cares for. When the people move camp across the water on a raft of kayaks lashed together, they push her into the sea. She grabs the edge of the raft, and they cut off her fingers. She sinks to the bottom, and her fingers become the seals; she becomes the mother of the sea animals, and, the Netsilingmiut told Rasmussen, the most feared of the powers, because she controls the animals on which life depends.

Iglulik: the hair that must be combed

Iglulik speakers described to Rasmussen, and elders later described in their own publications, what happens when people break the rules governing hunting, childbirth, and death. The breaches become dirt and tangles in the Sea Woman's hair. Having no fingers, she cannot comb it, and in anger and discomfort she keeps the seals, walrus, and whales in her house, so that hunters return empty-handed and families go hungry.

When that happens, an angakkuq undertakes a spirit journey to her house at the bottom of the sea, passing dangers on the way. The angakkuq combs and cleans her hair, soothes her, and asks her to let the animals go, and back in the community people confess the breaches that caused her anger. This site does not describe the practice beyond what published elders' accounts make public.

What the story teaches

In every version the Sea Woman is someone who was wronged: tricked, rejected, or discarded, and maimed by those who should have protected her. Her power over the animals is bound up with that wrong, and with the obligations people have to one another and to the animals they hunt. Tellers today often stress her dignity and the justice of her anger; she is not a sea monster but the keeper of a relationship that people must maintain.