The Woman Whose Fingers Became the Seals
At the bottom of the Arctic sea lives a goddess with no fingers and total power over every whale, walrus and seal — and she got that way because someone she trusted threw her overboard.
In the villages of the Inuit, hunters who returned empty-handed did not simply blame bad luck. They blamed a woman living far beneath the ice, and they sent their shaman down to soothe her. Her name was Sedna, though depending on who told the story and where — Greenland, Nunavut, Labrador, Igloolik — she might be called Sassuma Arnaa, Nuliajuk, Arnapkapfaaluk, or simply 'Old-woman-who-lived-in-the-sea.'
The stories about how she came to rule the deep differ wildly, but they share a devastating shape. In every telling, Sedna ends up in a kayak with her father, a storm or a crisis erupts, and he throws her into the water. In every telling, as she clings desperately to the boat, he cuts off her fingers. And in every telling, those severed fingers do not simply vanish — they become the seals, walruses, and whales that Inuit hunters depend on for survival.
One version casts her as a giant, daughter of the creator-god Anguta, whose enormous hunger drove her to attack her own parents. Enraged, Anguta paddled her out to sea and hurled her overboard, chopping her fingers away as she grasped the kayak's edge. She sank into the underworld and became ruler of its monsters, her huge severed fingers transforming into the ringed seals and whales hunted ever after.
Another version paints her as a defiant daughter who married a dog against her father's wishes, provoking him to throw her into the sea and cut off her fingers as she tried to climb back in. In the Netsilik telling, she is instead a mistreated orphan whom the community tries to drown, chopping her fingertips off until they become seals and walruses; she eventually marries a sculpin and takes her place ruling the sea.
Perhaps the most elaborate versions involve deception. In these, Sedna is a beautiful young woman who spurns the hunters courting her. A mysterious stranger arrives, her father trades her to him for fish, and only after a sleeping potion and a journey to a cliffside nest does she discover her new husband is a bird-spirit — a raven, fulmar, or petrel-being. When her father tries to rescue her, the bird-spirit conjures a storm so violent that, in desperation, her father throws his own daughter into the sea to save himself, severing her fingers as she clings on, one joint at a time in some accounts — the tips, then the knuckle, then the last knuckle — until she sinks and grows a fishtail.
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