The tale of Sedna

On our journey through the Northwest Passage, we had some cultural interpreters on our Expedition Team. As cultural interpreters, they help the team and our guests understand the customs of people we meet when we visit some of the most remote communities in the world, such as the Inuit we visited in the small ports of call along the Passage. They gave us insights into the history and traditions of their people, taught us a few words of their language, introduced us to their art and told us some of their stories. One of the stories my lovely colleague Ashley told us was the tale of Sedna, and later on in our journey, in Greenland, I learned even more about the myth of Sedna. It’s a fascinating story, so I’ll try to tell it with my own words.

(I hope telling another people’s story won’t be considered cultural appropriation – but I will follow up with my take on that in a post later on, I promise!)

So, this is how Sedna’s story goes; there are many different versions of this story, by the way, but this is the version I heard and remember.

Sedna was a beautiful godess, but she was terribly stubborn. Her father had tried for a long time to marry her off, but she would not accept any suitor and refused to marry. Finally, her father decided to marry her off to a fisherman who lived on a remote island. She protested and complained, but he would not have any of it: Enough was enough. He rode her out to the island in his boat, left her there, and started to row back.

But Sedna was not so easily going to give up. She jumped into the sea and swam after her father, and when she had reached him, she tried to climb back into the boat.

Her father saw her hand grasping to the boat and struck her frozen fingers with his paddle, so hard that he cut through them. Sedna and her fingers fell back into the icy cold ocean, and Sedna sank to the bottom of the sea, where she resides until this day. Her fingers, however, became the creatures of the sea: The whales, the seals, the fish and the squid. To this day, Sedna rules over the seas and the creatures in it, an angry betrayed goddess. It is Sedna who decides on the fate and the catch of the fishermen who hunt the creatures of the sea.

Without fingers, it has become impossible for Sedna to comb her own hair, which becomes knotted, unruly and tangled with the debris that swims in the sea, which further frustrates and angers Sedna, and in her rage, she will cause rough seas and bad catches for the humans.

There was one village, specifically, that was having a hard time making a catch at all. The people were starving, so they decided to send their shaman down to the bottom of the sea to speak to Sedna and ask her for mercy. This was a perilious task – normally, those who ventured to the bottom of the sea did not return. The shaman, however, took a polar bear along. The polar bear was strong and held open Sedna’s door when they arrived at her abode. The shaman spoke softly to Sedna and offered to brush her hair, to which she agreed.

In return for his favour, she promised that the hunters from his village should return successfully in future, every time they headed out to sea. However, no-one must ever take out more than their family could eat in a day.

The shaman returned to his people and gave them the good news, and the next day, all huntsmen returned home successfully. Finally, the villagers had food again and were saved from starvation. All but one of the fishermen obeyed Sedna’s command to hunt to more than they needed; just one fisherman got greedy and caught more than he needed.

Sedna kept her promise, and all fishermen in the village always returned home succesffully after a day of hunting – all except the one, who had been greedy. He never caught another fish in all his life.

To honour and appease Sedna, Inuit women wear finger tattoos symbolising where Sedna’s fingers where cut off. If a woman failed to have her fingers tattooed, Sedna would deny her access to the afterlife, so it was important to pay tribute to the mighty goddess by having your fingers tattooed.

The tale of Sedna is also a teaching in sustainability, with her demanding from the fishermen not to overfish the seas. Another Inuit tradition related to the tale of Sedna was to place some fresh water into the mouth of every of her creatures a hunter had caught, honouring the fact that it had been sacrificed to nourish humans: A reverence to what feeds us and basic respect for the life we consume that we, as Westerners, have often lost.

Traditional Inuit tattoos are experiencing a revival in the Inuit community, and the old symbolism is being re-discovered by young Inuit women who wear their tattoos with great pride – and yes, in Inuit culture, it was mainly women who got tattooed. Men did have tattoos, but they were much more widely seen on women. Inuit tattoos have traditional, but also highly personal meaning and are rich in symbolism, but the tradition – along with many other Inuit traditions – was all but wiped out by Christian missionaries when they arrived in these parts of the world.

Hearing the tale of Sedna and looking at my own finger tattoos – which symbolise that I was left unsupervised in a tattoo parlour with money to spend – I can’t help but admire the beauty and meaning of the Inuit tattoos, and wonder whether I should perhaps get a few more tattoos on my own hands. Just to be on the safe side – you never know, if I don’t, I might not find peace in the afterlife, and that seems like a terribly big risk.