Clinging to the edge of her father’s kayak in the freezing Arctic Ocean, she reaches up for help and sees a blade come down on her fingers. This deep dive treats Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea and mother of marine animals, as the subject of a narrative biography, examining her three very different mortal origins as a proud maiden, a ravenous giant, and a mistreated orphan, and what each reveals about the anxieties of Arctic survival.

We follow her deceptive marriage to a bird spirit, her father’s rescue and panicked betrayal, and the severing that seeded the ocean with seals, walruses, and whales. We then explore her vengeful reign in Adlivun, why shamans must descend in trance to comb her tangled hair, the offerings thrown into the sea at Killiniq in Labrador, and her legacy in Inuit sculpture, the television series North of North, and the dwarf planet 90377 Sedna.

• Mother of the Deep, Nuliajuk, Big Bad Woman: her regional names across Greenland, Nunavut, and the Coronation Gulf
• Why a father who crossed an ocean to save his daughter would throw her overboard
• Fingertips into seals, knuckles into walruses, final joints into whales
• Radical accountability: the shaman’s journey to the abyss and the ritual of combing her hair
• Tanya Tagaq, climate change, and a frozen world at the edge of the solar system named in her honor