Her home is on the bottom of the ocean. She rules this fluid world, taking care of all it’s creatures big and small in her embrace – where she ends and they start it is not clear. She is their keeper, they are hers. In a world where equilibrium depends on all the elements within the ocean and out it, she controls their surroundings to protect them, protect herself.
She was revered and held in high esteem at one point. Feared like a loving anaanatsiaq (grandmother) – if you give her devotion, she will return it multiplied. However, you do not want to upset her, as you only hurt your source of affection, means of nourishment. Treatment of her, is a reflection of yourself.
We are starting to forget her. The role of maintaining balance in all our connections with all the animate branches of what sustains life. Forgetting the importance of our relationships with her and other universe’s great forces. Including between genders, as hunters, who are predominantly men must appease her. Instead we are lost in ego, greed and consumerism. Departure from our center ominously filled with gloom and depression, eating at us within. The more we stray from her, the more we move towards habits of self-destruction.
All the food sources we rely on are part of her: her fingers are the seals; her palm, walruses; forearm the whales. When she gives us food, we savor in gratitude, becoming her, and she becoming us – in one entity that is the universe. All the goodness and evil blurred allowing us just to be. Still, calm, heart beating, breathing, gratified, content. We are water!
She is magnificent and fierce, an Inuk woman. When she is upset she holds animals back, entangled in her shiny thick black hair. She will only release them when she is appeased by an offering, a song or a spiritual visit from one who will untangle her hair, hair that is floating freely in the currents – as she cannot do it herself not having any fingers.
She is known throughout the Inuit world as sanna (sedna), sanaji, nuliajuq, talilajuq, takannaaluk, or the one who should not be named. The force of the ocean!