Once Sedna was a mortal woman, spoiled by her family and unwilling to leave the comfort of her father’s home and marry. Eventually, a man wooed her with entrancing song, and she consented to marry him. He carried her to his home beyond the sea.

Too late she found that he was a petrel, a bird man, and had deceived her. He could not take care of her, and fed her only fish.

Sedna became pregnant and gave birth to six children. Three of them were Yupik children, but the other three had bigger ears and snoutlike noses. She did not know how to build a kayak. Instead, she sewed sealskins into one large slipper, placed the three strange children inside, and pushed them off toward the south. Some say white men and Indians are descended from those strange children and only through them are they related to Yupik.

Later, when Sedna’s father Anguta came by umiak and tried to rescue her, the bird raised such a storm that the boatmen cast her into the sea to save themselves. She would not let go, but attempted to cling to the boat.

First her father cut off her fingers, which became the seals. Then, as she still clung to the boat, he cut off her hands, and those transformed into the walruses and sea lions. With one last cut, her father removed her forearms, which transformed into the whales in the sea.

Finally, Sedna sank to the bottom, and became a goddess, the mother of the sea. She dwells in her house in the depths of the sea, trimming her lamp, guarded by a terrible dog, and ruling over the animal life of the deep.

Because she was hurt and discarded as a woman, she became cruel and capricious as is the sea itself. Sometimes when the hunters catch no seals, then the angulkuq become fish and go down to her to persuade her to release the food animals.

Sedna’s father lives with her in her house. Anguta is a shadowy figure, and like his daughter, he has a maimed hand. He uses this hand to seize the dead and drag them down to her house — for her sovereignty is over the souls of the dead as well as over the sea and food of the living; she is mistress of life and of death.