metropolis m

Across the circumpolar North, the story of the water goddess Sedna prevails as one of the most beloved and animated myths of Inuit culture. For communities born of open-water hunting and fishing, it is no surprise that Sedna is a key figure for she is the one who governs the sea and maintains its plenitude. But Sedna is more than a cultural fabulation; she is a lively actant who could not be more contemporary, especially for Inuit artists who give articulation to the perturbations of climate change in the Arctic.  Sedna is making an appearance on the world stage and brings with her a sensibility for how myths of water are vectors for the global transformations that act on the earth’s oceans and waterways. 

Since the 19th century, the myth of Sedna has captured the imaginations of anthropologists and explorers who recorded the many variations of her story across Alaska, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Greenland. The story of Sedna culminates in the creation of sea mammals: the whales, narwhal, walrus and seals that sustain the Inuit. But her myth tells of so much more about Inuit social economy as well. The story begins with the dilemma of Sedna’s status as young woman who refuses to marry, and the struggle that ensues as her father tries to place her with a husband. As the story unfolds Sedna’s father is tricked into brokering a marriage agreement with a man who was secretly part fulmar (an Arctic sea-bird). While he had promised that he was a successful hunter and would provide Sedna with plenty of food, when she arrived at her new home she discovered the truth about the birdman: that not only was he not a hunter at all, he only ate fish and his home was covered in smelly fish-skins. When her father came to visit her and he saw how unhappy she was; he killed the birdman and tried to bring her home in his kayak. However, the two were swarmed by a flock of vengeful fulmars. They beat their wings and stirred up the ocean until, terrified, Sedna’s father flung her overboard as a sacrifice. When she clung to the edge of the boat, her father cut off her fingers all the way to their stumps. Her fingers sunk down into the ocean and became the sea-creatures: walruses, seals, narwhals and whales.   

The etymology of Sedna’s Greenlandic name, Aiviliajoq, has been traced to its roots aiv, meaning “giving”, iliaq to denote a temporal doing, iaq meaning “plenty” and joq “one who”. In full, her name connotes “the one who periodically [seasonally] brings plenty of useful things.” In times of duress when animals are scarce—times when Sedna is said to be angry—an angekok (shaman) must turn into a fish and travel to the ocean underworld where she still dwells. The shaman must clean and braid her hair since she cannot do it herself with her disfigured hands. The balance between the community and the sea is therefore upheld through the care and comfort of Sedna.

As the world of contemporary art grapples with the legacies of global colonization and resource extraction—particularly climate change and its symptoms such as warming ocean waters, glacier melt, changing animal migration patterns, animal extinctions, and the European embargos on the industries of the Arctic Inuit—the figure of Sedna has begun to appear with particular vigor. At the 2012 Liverpool Biennale, Greenlandic artist Jessie Kleemann performed a work called Sassuma Arnaa, “Mother of the Deep,” another moniker for Sedna. Over the course of the performance, Kleemann enacted different aspects of the myth and set these to a haunting vocal by singer, Iben Mondrup and sound by Niels Lynge. She demarcated the space of the performance by hanging beakers of seal blubber. She then moved through this space, and eventually in and out of the audience. Initially, she covered her naked body in a white textile, writhing underneath it in such a way as to simulate metamorphosis from raw matter. She eventually disrobed to her underwear and heightened the facets of exposure, aggression and abandonment that characterize the story of Sedna. Taking one viewer’s glass of red wine, she poured it over herself inferring bloodshed. She then took a handful of ice cubes and painfully rolled them over her fingers, letting them fall to the ground in a gesture that suggests Sedna’s dismemberment. In this way, Kleemann connoted the mechanism of sacrifice on which sea life and Inuit livelihood relies.

As art historian Kristen Thisted argues, Jessie Kleemann’s performances are rife with the ambivalent position of Greenlanders, who were stigmatized by the colonial lens of Danes and other Europeans who disdained Inuit practices of hunting and cooking, especially their pervasive use of pungent smelling blubber. In the postcolonial era, there has been an impetus to counteract the colonial lens and affirm the beauty of Inuit identity with an embrace of the practices of drumming, dancing and of course, myth. Yet, Kleemann’s performances surface the more complex feelings of shame, loss and inferiority that are the inheritance of the colonial view of Indigeneity. Her performances are also a vector by which to reveal how the condition of sea life is interwoven with Inuit economy, identity and performative expression. Sassuma Arnaa not only retells the myth of Sedna, it calls on that myth as specifically relevant to the plight of independence for Greenlanders, as well as their abandonment and disfigurement at the hands of paternalistic colonialism. 

The figure of Sedna expresses the lived impact of climate change, moreso than any scientific fact or economic prediction. Her myth illustrates an ideal economy with the sea and a value system that upholds its balance. When Kleemann reenacts her story of origin, she calls forth an original perturbation of that balance, the periodic need to reciprocate the generosity of her sacrificed fingers. But what was once a cycle of mythic sacrifice and reciprocated care is now a deeply compromised value system. Indeed, it seems that Sedna’s ocean underworld reacts to the contemporary predicament by generating phantasms that show how compromised sea-life has become. Sedna’s myth is changing; her story is not that of a young woman tricked into marriage and sacrificed by her father. Rather, she is the guardian of the sea who faces the betrayal of Southerners who occupy her domain and pollute her waters. 

Consider two drawings by Shuvenai Ashoona, an Inuit artist from Cape Dorset, Nunavut: the first, Titanic, Nascopie and Noah’s Ark and the second Universal Cobra Pussy, a collaborative drawing with Toronto-based artist Shary Boyle. In the first, Titanic, Nascopie and Noah’s Ark, Ashoona visually recounts the historic sinking of the RMS Nascopie, a supply ship from the Canadian Hudson’s Bay Company that sank in the icy waters near the Cape Dorset harbour, where it struck uncharted reef in July of 1947. The story of the sinking of the Nascopie is still remembered by the elders and is a favourite story that has been depicted in the work of several of the Cape Dorset artists of Ashoona’s generation. This oral history is transcribed and transformed by Ashoona’s hand, as she summons images, entities, and associations from the colonial, to the Biblical to the monstrous. The ship is identified by three names written on its starboard: the Nascopie, the Titanic—another ship that garnered notoriety as a Victorian dream turned catastrophe—and Noah’s Ark. The latter reference not only evokes a global scale flood, but also resonated with contemporary climate change. Yet, in the drawing the presence of mythic animals alters the story of Noah’s ark. Instead of the ship salvaging two of each species, the Nascopie seems to have elicited the presence of monstrous sea animals: a giant tentacled squid-like creature lurks in the depths of the water aiming at the Inuit villagers who attempt to save the food and goods from the sinking ship. On the shoreline, a winged polar bear growls at the squid as her three young cubs scamper from the nearby cave. The squid appears as a spectral emissary from the icy deep, neither belonging to the angelic animal kingdom of the Arctic, nor of the colonial assemblage in the harbour, but rather something in between – an anarchical hinge between the two that aggressively binds this scene together. Does the squid come from the ship or did it ransack the ship from the depth’s of the sea? Is it an indicator of Sedna’s displeasure? Does it haunt the history of trade in the Arctic archipelago like a guilty conscience, floating up and sinking back periodically? What has been unleashed by Ashoona’s retelling of this history?