Sedna, mother of the waters of Adlivun. Once Sedna was a beautiful woman, living atop the land with her father. Sedna was intensely skilled in most things, able to hunt and provide for herself. Sedna was vehemently independent, something her father, Anguta, didn’t agree with. Continuously, Sedna’s father brought endless suitors to her, yet she turned down each and every one of them. Frustrated by her father’s insistence on her getting married, in an act of rebellion Sedna married a dog. Infuriated with his daughter, her father took her out on a boat and in a fit of rage threw her overboard. Sedna tried desperately to cling to the boat, but her father took out his knife and cut off her fingers, sentencing Sedna to the dark abyss. Falling beneath the waves, Sedna’s lungs were smothered by the sea, drowning her. However, as the water embraced Sedna, she began to change. Her loose fingers morphed into the life and bounty of the sea creating the fish seals and whales, as Sedna herself awoke once more as the goddess of the ocean. It was here in which Sedna became the creator and ruler of Adlivun, the underworld where good souls go to be purified before being sent to the stars with the goddess Pana, and where evil souls spend the rest of eternity. Sedna controls every part of the sea, from the storms, to the waves, to every animal that swims through it. Usually Sedna is the one who provides the animals in which the Inuit hunt, but when angered, Sedna will trap the animals of the sea in her long unkept hair, bringing famine upon the human race. In order to remedy this, an Angakkuq shaman uses his spirit to traverse Adlivun. But, as Senda no longer has fingers, she’s unable to comb her own hair, so the shaman in their spirit form combs her hair for her, both soothing her and freeing the animals caught in her hair.
Sedna is goddess worshipped by the indigenous Inuit of arctic america, her domain covering both the sea and death. There are many different telling of Sedna’s origin. In one she’s the daughter of giants, who grew so big and insatiable that her parents drowned her in the sea. A different story details that she was an orphan child who was drowned by her village. In another her father was tricked by a spirit bird who kidnapped Sedna in an attempt to marry her, Anguta pursued the bird and rescued Sedna only for her to be accidentally thrown overboard in the chaos. Sedna’s father, sometimes referred to as Anguta, is commonly depicted as a god as well her mother who’s occasionally named Isarrataitsoq. Similar to Sedna, Anguta is sometimes detailed as a god of the dead, specifically a psychopomp, ferrying dead souls to the realm of Adlivun. However in Greenland Anguta is worshipped as the chief creator god. In Greenland, Sedna’s position as a god of the underworld is replaced by the demonized god Torngarsuk, who possibly grew out of Sedna who’s mainly a sea goddess. In some areas Sedna lives with her partner deity Qailertetang, who watches over the animals of the sea and is said to be large and have heavy limbs. The Netsilik Inuit believed that Sedna alongside Isarraitaitsoq (a possible splinter god of Sedna) were the wives of the cabezon fish god Kanajuk with which they have an adopted child. The Inuit new year holiday Quviasukvik revolves around Sedna, in which two villagers become dress up in ornate masked costumes to become representative spirits of Sedna and chase pairs of men and women into the women’s huts, then they’d pray to the north wind while admonishing the south wind, once finished the men of the village emerge and pretend to kill the two by slashing open their seal skins, after their “deaths” the two are reborn and are given water by the men who ask them questions about the future and are then answered with inaudible grumbles that they must interpret for themselves. Sedna goes by a multitude of different names across the Inuit peoples, including Nuliajuk, Nuliayuk, Takánakapsâluk, Takannaaluk, Nerrivik among many others. Her name Sassuma Arnaa means “mother of the deep” in Inuit, she was also given the title of Old Woman Who Lived In The Sea. In the Coronation Gulf she’s referred to as Arnapkapfaaluk, but instead of the beneficial provider Sedna typically is, she’s instead seen as detrimental and malicious as she’s feared for taking away the animals they would hunt.
