Ottawa, Canada;
1971

In cigar stores, art galleries & museum shops across Canada, Eskimo stone art is available, popularly priced, popularly styled. Carvings of mermaids, those sexually frustrating figures from our own mythology, are especially popular. Here they are identified with the Eskimo goddess Sedna, though neither carvers nor buyers can be much concerned with accuracy, for these carvings always show a girl with two eyes, fingers & braided hair, whereas Sedna was one-eyed, fingerless & unkempt.

Of the myths that were once half-told, half-sung in the igloos, none was more important than that of Sedna. Every Eskimo knew it & had his own version, all equally true, for this myth was too complex for any single telling.

Sedna or Nuliajuk ("Young girl") rejected all suitors until a stranger induced her to elope with him. He was, in fact, a cruel dog disguised as a man, but she discovered this only after reaching her new home on a distant island.

Escape was impossible until one day when her family came to visit her. Her husband always refused to let her leave the tent, except to go to the toilet, and even then tied a long cord to her. But this time when she went outside and he called, asking why she delayed so long, she had the ball of cord reply that she would soon return.

In the meantime, she ran to the beach & joined her parents in their boat. But no sooner had they set out to sea, than her husband discovered the ruse and, transforming himself into a bird, swooped low over the fleeing family, turning the sea to storm, and threatening them with drowning. To save themselves, they cast Sedna overboard.

At first she clung to the gunwale. But her father cut off the first joints of her fingers; when she persisted, he cut off the second & third joints. They sank into the sea to become the seal, walrus & whale that the Eskimo hunt today.

In desperation, Sedna hooked her elbows over the side, but her father struck her with his paddle, gouging out an eye, and she sank into the sea, fingerless & one-eyed.

From the bottom of the sea, she ruled all creatures. Their floating bodies nearly filled her house. Periodically she sent animals forth to be taken by hunters, but only by hunters who showed respect for slain animals.

Other hunters returned empty-handed. That is, Sedna withheld life from them, for they could not survive without the food, clothing & fuel that came from her subjects.

She was the most feared of all spirits, the one who, more than any other, controlled the destinies of men.

In the various versions of this myth, Sedna was sometimes an unwanted daughter cast into the sea by her father, or a girl who has rejected all eligible men, or an orphan nobody wanted; in one version she was already a mother, abandoned by her own children. In each, she was someone the family abandoned for its own safety.

Abandonment of people was not purely mythical. The Eskimo did, in fact, abandon old people. Killing new-born girls was common. And the position of orphans was precarious: one's own family always took precedence. These were normal experiences in Eskimo life - cruel necessities forced on them by scarcity.

The Sedna myth represented this dilemma as the Eskimo saw it. They never asked that the universe be this way. But - ayornamut ("it cannot be otherwise"} - they accepted life on its own terms.

They did more than accept: they took upon themselves the responsibility for the fact that life was the way it was. They gave Sedna the power of life & death over man. Those who were forced to abandon her now placed themselves in her power, dependent upon her good will, her respect for life.

The hunter Aua, asked by the ethnologist Rasmussen to explain why life was as it was, took him outside and, pointing to hunters returning empty-handed after long hours on the ice, himself asked, "Why?" He then took him into a cold igloo where hungry children shivered and into another igloo where a woman, who had always worked hard and helped others, now lay miserably ill. Each time he asked, "Why?" but received no reply.

"You see," said Aua, "you are equally unable to give any reason when we ask why life is as it is. And so it must be. All our customs come from life and turn toward life; we explain nothing, we believe nothing, but in what I have just shown you lies our answer to all you ask."

The last part of the Sedna myth told of a maze to be entered & come out of alive, bringing the innocent to safety. In this maze there lived the dog whose name was Death. It fell to the angakok, or shaman, to find the door that opened the past, unravel the tangled traces of time, rescue the innocent & beware the dog. The occasion was a seance where the angakok sought to cure the sick & save the dying. If he failed & his patient died, its soul went beneath the sea to Sedna's home. The angakok followed, traveling on the sound of his drum. Sedna's husband, a snarling dog, guarded the entrance to her home, but the angakok paralyzed him with a chant & entered her strange house, confronting her directly. He tried to reason with her, arguing that she had taken a life without cause. But she ignored him. He begged for pity, but she laughed contemptuously. In anger, he twisted her arm & struck her with a walrus penis bone. But she was not afraid. Then he appealed to her vanity, combing out her tangled hair. But she was still unrelenting. Finally, ignoring her altogether, he stepped back and, with drum held high, sang of life.

Sedna was sometimes so touched by his song, so moved by his singing, she released the soul of the dead person, and the angakok returned with it to the land of the living.

In a life where neither reason nor strength prevailed, where cunning counted for little & pity least of all, the Eskimo sang of life, for only that availed, and even that, not always.

A people may be fairly judged by their uses of the past. The myth of the hero who goes to the land of the dead to unravel the threads of time & save the innocent has been shared by many people & woven into their most magical dreams. The ancient Greeks knew the hero as Orpheus. Literate man knew the goddess of the nether world as the Ice Queen in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale for children. Modern man knows the goddess as mermaid, debased into a paperweight.