Sedna, Mother of the Sea

A long time ago there was a girl named Sedna. She lived with her father by the sea, and she was beautiful and proud. Many young hunters of her own people came to ask for her, but she turned them all away. None of them was good enough.

One spring a stranger came over the ice. He was tall, dressed in fine furs, and he sang a song no one had heard before. He told Sedna he had a warm tent of skins, all the meat she could eat, and a soft bed of bear furs. He promised her she would never go hungry. Sedna agreed to leave with him. They got into his kayak and paddled far out across the water to a low island in the open sea.

When they came to his tent, she found that everything he had told her was a lie. The tent was poor and full of holes. The bed was made of fishskin and was wet with cold. The food was bad. He was no man at all but a fulmar, a sea bird, in a skin he had taken off and could put on again. She had been tricked. She wept, and her tears did not move him.

Sedna's father, far off on the mainland, missed his daughter. When summer came he took his kayak and paddled out to the island looking for her. He found her in the bad tent, and when the bird-husband was away from home he put her in his kayak and they fled toward the mainland.

The bird-husband came home, found the tent empty, and called the other fulmars. They flew up in a great cloud and beat their wings. The wind they raised drove a heavy storm across the sea. Black waves rose up around the kayak. The boat began to fill. The father grew terrified. He thought, "If I do not give them what they want, we will both die." He took hold of his daughter and threw her into the water.

Sedna grasped the side of the kayak. She held on with all her strength. Her father took his knife and cut off the first joints of her fingers. They fell into the sea, and where they fell they became seals.

Sedna held on with the stumps of her fingers. Her father struck again and cut off the second joints. They fell into the sea and became walruses.

She held on still with what was left of her hands. He struck once more and cut off the last joints, and these became the great whales.

Sedna sank to the bottom of the sea. The fulmars, satisfied, flew away. The storm calmed. The father reached the shore and went home. He did not speak of what he had done. But that night, the story is told, the sea rose and took him too, and his dogs, and his tent. Some say the sea ate him. Some say Sedna pulled him down to her.

Sedna lives now at the bottom of the sea, in a great house. She is the mother of all the sea creatures. The seals and the walruses and the whales are her children, made from her fingers. They obey her. When she is angry with the people on the land above her, when they have not kept the right rules, when they have killed without thanks, when they have hidden their wrongdoings from each other, the sea creatures stay away from the hunters and the people go hungry.

Then a shaman must go down to her. He must travel in spirit through the dark water to her house. He must sit beside her on the floor of the sea and comb her tangled hair, because she has no fingers and cannot comb it herself. As he combs, the dirt and trouble that are in her hair come out. He talks to her. He confesses for the people what they have done wrong. He calms her. When her hair is clean and braided, she releases the seals and the walruses and the whales again, and they swim up where the hunters can find them, and the people eat.

This is why the people remember Sedna. They keep the rules of the sea so she will not be angry. They speak gently of her, even now. She is the one who lost her fingers and gave them to the sea so the sea could feed us.