Sedna
myth of the Igloolik region
A girl would not take a husband, and at last her father
in anger said that she would take a dog. One night a dog came in and
took her as a wife.
When the girl became
pregnant, the father isolated her on a small island, but the dog swam
over to join her. It would swim in from time to time with the pack
saddle to get meat from the father. The girl bore a litter - some
dog children, some children in human form . One day, feeling sorry
for her, the father loaded the dog with stones, concealed with meat
on top. When the dog swam out, he sank and drowned. Then the father
used to take the meat over to the island.
Next the angry daughter told her dog children to attack their
grandfather's kayak, but he managed to escape back to the mainland.
He dared not go to the island anymore. Now in need, the girl
put her dog children in a boot setting three straws for masts,
and they drifted out to sea to become the ancestors of the white
man. She put her human form children in the additionnal outer
sole of a boot and sent them drifting to the land to give rise
to the Chipewyan Indians. Then she returned home to live with
her parents once more.
One day while the father was away hunting, a kayak arrived
and a fine big man called the girl out to go off with him; which
she did. Stopping by an ice float en route, the kayaker got out
and removed his sun goggles, whereupon the girl burst into tears
for the man was punny, having only been sitting tall on a high
seat, and had ugly eyes, a northern fulmar in human form. They
went on to the bird's sealskin tent where they lived together
and had a child.
But her sorrowing father set out in a boat to look for her and
arrived one day while the fulmar was out hunting. He took her away
in his boat. The fulmar, in bird form, caught up and swooping close
it raised such a storm with its wings that the boat nearly capsised.
In fear the father threw the girl overboard to her husband, but
she clung to the gunwale. So he chopped off her first finger joints,
and they bobbed up in the water as small seals. Again she grasped
the boat's edge, so the father hacked off the next finger joints
which became bearded seals. Still the girl hung on, and the last
joints were cut off, forming the walruses .Then she sank to become
a spirit, the mother of the sea beasts. The father got home, but
in remorse he laid down at the water's edge under a skin, and the
tide swept him out to join his daughter and the dog in a house at
the bottom of the sea.
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