Sedna

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At the bottom of the sea sits a woman with no fingers and a head of hair she cannot comb. The seals and walruses swimming just past her — the ringed seal, the great tusked walrus, the whales — are the joints of her own fingers, cut from her hand as she clung to the side of a boat and sunk into the cold. She rules them now. And tangled into the same long hair that no fingerless hand can reach is the dirt of everything the people above have done wrong: the bones mishandled, the game of land and sea mixed where they should have been kept apart, the births and deaths and bloods around which the rules were broken. When the hair grows too foul she closes her hand over the animals, and up in the world of the living the hunt fails and the famine comes. This is the first thing to understand about her, and nearly the only thing every telling of her shares: the food does not simply run out. It is withheld, by someone, for cause.

The one down there

“Sedna” is a traveler’s word — the form written down on Baffin Island, an English rendering of the Inuktitut Sanna (ᓴᓐᓇ). It is the name the wider world happens to know, and it is only one of hers. Across the circumpolar Inuit world, from the coasts of northern Alaska through Arctic Canada to the fjords of eastern Greenland, the mistress of the sea-beasts carries a different name in nearly every region, and the names are themselves a kind of theology. In the Kivalliq, on the western shore of Hudson Bay, she is Nuliajuk; among the Iglulik she is Takannaaluk or Takannakapsaluk — “the one down there” — which is less a name than a direction, the whole cosmos oriented downward toward the house at the sea floor. The Copper Inuit near Coronation Gulf call her Arnapkapfaaluk, the “Big Bad Woman,” a plain acknowledgment that she is not to be loved but reckoned with. In Greenland she is Sassuma Arnaa, the “Mother of the Deep,” and Arnakuagsak; elsewhere Nerrivik, the food dish. She is not many goddesses with a shared résumé. She is one power that the land itself pronounces differently, the way the same sea sounds different in every inlet.

Almost everything the written record holds about her passes through two men, both outsiders, both interested, both working at the far edge of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth centuries. Franz Boas spent 1883 and 1884 among the Inuit of Cumberland Sound on Baffin Island, learning the language and sharing the snow houses, and published The Central Eskimo in 1888 — the first sustained account of the sea woman to reach the scholarly world. Four decades later the Greenlandic-Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen crossed Arctic Canada by dog sled on the Fifth Thule Expedition of 1921–24, living for days or months at a time with the Iglulik, the Netsilik, the Caribou, and the Copper Inuit, and his ten-volume report remains the most-cited body of Netsilik material there is. Everything that follows rests on that record and must be read through it: it is the ethnography of a moment that assumed it was watching something die, filtered through the categories of early anthropology, and it is not the same thing as the tradition’s own voice — which was never written because the Inuit kept no writing, and which is alive today in the people who still carry it.

A family of tellings

There is no single true story of how she came to the bottom of the sea. There is a family of them, and to flatten the family into one canonical myth is already to misread it. The Wikipedia summary of the myth counts the variants and finds one shared bone under all the flesh: her father takes her out in his boat, and her fingers are cut away, and from them come the animals of the sea.

In the tellings most often heard, she is a girl who will have no husband. She refuses every suitor her father brings until a stranger arrives — in some versions a handsome hunter who proves to be a fulmar or a petrel in a man’s shape, in others a raven, in others a dog — and carries her off across the water to a bleak island where the truth of him is revealed. Her father comes to take her back, and out on the sea a storm rises, the wronged bird-spirit beating the water against the boat. To save himself the father throws his daughter over the side. She catches the gunwale with her hands, and he takes his knife to her fingers. The first joints fall into the sea and become the ringed seals; the second joints become the walruses; the last become the whales, or in some tellings the great bearded seals. Fingerless, she slips beneath the surface and does not drown but descends, and takes up her rule of everything her hands became.

Among the Netsilik the story is harder and has no romance in it at all. There she is Nuliajuk, an orphan girl whom her own community mistreats — and when the people are crossing the water and their skin boat is in danger, they throw the unwanted child overboard to lighten it, and cut off her fingers when she clings to the side, and she sinks to become the one who holds all the game and, thereafter, holds them accountable. The Iglulik and the Baffin versions dwell on the finger-joints falling in ordered sequence; the Greenlandic tellings name her the Mother of the Deep and set her house at the very floor of the world. To ask which is the real one is to ask the wrong question. The variation is the point: the sea is different in every place that depends on it, and so is the woman who governs it.

The fouled hair

The sea woman is the moral center of gravity of Inuit religion, and she is that precisely because the sea is not scenery but food. The animals a coastal people live on are not simply there to be taken. They are released — given up, conditionally, by the one who holds them — and the condition is conduct. This is the great difference between her world and a world of worship-and-reward. She is not benevolent. She keeps no covenant out of love. She keeps a ledger, and the ledger is written on her body.

When the people break the rules that order their life — the elaborate system of taboo the ethnographers labeled piusiit, governing the handling of animal bones, the strict separation of the creatures of the land from the creatures of the sea, the seclusions surrounding a birth, a death, a woman’s blood — the transgressions do not go to some abstract account. They travel down through the water and gather in her hair as filth and tangles. She has no fingers with which to clean it. She sits in her fouled hair growing angrier, and as her anger rises she closes her hand, and the seals and the walruses go with her, out of reach of every hunter, and the people begin to starve. In Inuit religion the failure of the hunt is rarely just bad luck. It is a verdict.

The remedy, as Rasmussen set it down among the Netsilik and the Iglulik, is a journey — and it must be described here at the distance the record itself keeps, as a thing that happens, not as a thing to be done. When the famine holds, the angakkuq, the one able to travel where others cannot, goes down to her. In a dwelling darkened for the purpose, before the gathered people, he falls into trance and sends his spirit down through the sea, past the guardians of her threshold, to the house at the bottom. There he does for her what she cannot do for herself: he combs the filth from her hair and braids it clean, and as he works he speaks aloud the misdeeds the community has hidden, one by one, until the confession is spent. Cleaned and appeased, she opens her hand. The seals return to the breathing-holes, and the people live. This is a cosmos of mediated accountability rather than devotion — care owed and care rendered, a debt combed out of a tangled head of hair.

She does not stand alone. She is the mistress of the sea, but the sea is one province of a peopled world. Sila is the air and the weather and the reason in things, a life-force diffused through the whole world and thrown into disorder by the same broken taboos that foul her hair. Torngarsuk, whose nature the sources themselves cannot agree on — a bear, a one-armed giant, a great man, the master of the sea-beasts, the chief of the helping-spirits — is the power the angakkuq commands, the tornait and tuurngait at his call. Nanook is the great bear whose killed soul must be honored or it will warn the others away. And in the same morally charged field, at its darkest edge, is the tupilaq, the made thing sent through the water to kill an enemy — which, like the descent to the sea woman, the record describes only from the outside and never as a set of instructions. It was to Rasmussen, on the Fifth Thule Expedition, that the Iglulik angakkuq Aua gave the sentence that holds this whole world in a single line — that to live in the Arctic is to eat souls. Asked what the Inuit believed, Aua answered: “We do not believe. We fear.” The sea woman is what there is to fear, and what there is to keep faith with, at once.

A carved wooden figure of the Inuit sea-mother Sedna, hair streaming, the lower body tapering into a seal or fish form. Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

The devil’s work, and after

The way the sea woman entered the wider world cannot be told apart from the effort to bury her. From 1721, when the Norwegian Lutheran missionary Hans Egede landed in Greenland and opened what became the Danish and Moravian mission, the older cosmology was read through a single lens and found guilty. The missionaries took the great spirit Torngarsuk and mapped him directly onto the Christian Devil; they named the whole world of Sila and the sea-mother and the tornait “the devil’s work”; and they set out to break the angakkuit, the ones who traveled to her, by threat and at times by force. That reading is a historical problem to be named, not a description to be believed. It is the reason the record comes to us in the shape it does — a sacred order documented largely by the people most committed to ending it.

The colonial account does not stop at the mission, and it should be held soberly, without either sensation or softening. Through the twentieth century the Inuit of Arctic Canada were moved, counted, and renamed by a distant state. In the High Arctic relocation of 1953, families from Inukjuak in northern Quebec were shipped far north to Grise Fiord and Resolute — “human flagpoles,” in the phrase later used, planted to assert Canadian sovereignty over the ice — and left to a hunger the government had promised they would not meet. Between roughly 1950 and the 1970s the RCMP killed Inuit sled dogs, the qimmiit on which winter travel and the hunt depended, in numbers the affected communities still dispute with the state. From the 1940s into the 1970s each Inuk in Canada was issued a small pressed-fiber disc stamped “Eskimo Identification Canada” and a number — the “disc number” system — a name in metal replacing the names the people already had. Residential and day schools, and the sealing and whaling bans that gutted the coastal economy, belong in the same ledger. None of it is incidental to the sea woman. It is the history the tradition survived.

And survive it did, which is why it must be spoken of in the present. The reception in popular culture runs alongside the harder record and is not innocent of it. Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the film usually named as the birth of the feature documentary, in fact staged much of the “traditional” life it claimed merely to observe: the hunter Allakariallak, renamed Nanook because Flaherty found the name more marketable, was directed to hunt with the old harpoon though he owned a rifle, and the igloo interior was a three-walled set cut open to the sky for the camera. It stands now as a founding case study in ethnographic misrepresentation — the Inuit filmed as a people frozen outside of history, precisely as they were being dragged through it.

Two objects trace the same passage from sacred to salable. The inuksuk — a stone figure raised across the Arctic as a waymarker, a route-marker, a marshal for the caribou drive, its very name meaning something that acts in the place of a person — became the emblem of a new Inuit homeland when Nunavut was established in 1999, set on the territory’s flag and coat of arms. Then in 2005 an inunnguaq, the human-figure variant of the stone marker, was unveiled as “Ilanaaq” — “friend” — the logo of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, a design by Elena Rivera MacGregor. Inuit cultural leaders, among them the former Nunavut commissioner Peter Irniq, objected that an inunnguaq is not a true inuksuk and that a southern games had borrowed an Arctic sign it did not understand. The tupilaq has made the same crossing: the secret revenge-creature of Greenland is now a widely sold form of carved souvenir art, worked in tooth and tusk and antler for a market that once sent the demand.

A small carved tupilaq figure from Greenland, a compact grotesque creature worked from bone or tusk. Kattiel, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

In 2003 her name reached the sky. On 14 November of that year, from Palomar Observatory, the astronomers Michael Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz found a small reddish world far beyond the orbit of Neptune, and named it 90377 Sedna. Brown chose the name because the object sits at one of the coldest, most distant places then known in the solar system, its surface near the far end of its 11,400-year orbit never rising above about −240 degrees Celsius, and that frozen remoteness put him in mind of the sea-mother’s home at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. It is a fitting accident. The dwarf planet holds no seals and answers no confession. But the reasoning that reached for her is the reasoning of the tradition itself: that the coldest deep is exactly where the one who feeds the living would keep her house, and hold what she holds, and wait to see whether the people are worth the release.

She is not a story that ended. The Inuit and the Yup’ik are living peoples, their language and their masks and their carvers at work, their heritage being deliberately revived — Nunavut governed from within since 1999, Greenland moving into self-rule — and the sea-mother is carried in that living current, not embalmed in Boas and Rasmussen. The oldest image of her is also the plainest: a woman at the bottom of the water, her hands gone into the animals she rules, her hair heavy with everything the people have done. What the tradition asks of them is not worship. It is to give her back her hands — to comb the tangles out, to say aloud what was done, and to be, for one more season, a people she can bear to feed.

→ Related: Nanook · Torngarsuk · Sila · Tupilaq · The Inuit · The Yupik · The Dorset Culture · Nunalleq · Qajartalik · Inuksuk Point · Aasivissuit Nipisat