Sedna Sculpture from the National Museum of Finland

Peoples throughout the Arctic tell the ancient story of the Goddess Sedna,
a young woman who disobeys the rules of her family and flees from their
grasp. When her parents catch up, they seize her to take her home in their
kayak. But, as they attempt to leave, a great storm sweeps over them.
Believing that their daughter’s disobedience caused the ocean’s turbulence
and desiring to save themselves, Sedna’s parents throw her into the churning
water. As Sedna clings to her parents’ kayak for safety, they chop off
her fingers in order to free themselves from her. Tragically betrayed, abandoned
to die by her family, she sinks into the frigid water. But all is not lost.
The Great Mystery transforms Sedna into a deity and changes her severed
fingers into all the creatures of the sea. Today, Sedna is the powerful
Mother of the Sea who rules the Arctic Underworld and prepares the souls
of the living for their next stage on life’s journey.
SEDNA’S DRAMA IS NOT UNUSUAL—after all, the Hebrew God orders
Abraham to kill his son Isaac. None of us believes these gruesome foundational
narratives excuse family violence. Instead we understand them as metaphors,
teachings that have deep religious and cultural importance. As a Native American Studies educator and researcher, I’ve studied various versions of many peoples’ creation stories. But I never dared to fully imagine
Sedna’s frozen-blue fingers desperately clinging to an icy kayak. I never
dared to fully imagine the scene of her parents’ axe coming down on her
hands, her blood spilling into the ocean as she sank out of sight. I didn’t dare
to fully engage in such horrific scenes because I couldn’t accept that parents
would brutalize, physically harm, or murder their daughters. I was not aware
that family violence against women and girls is pervasive and universal. That thousands of daughters globally are murdered by their families and in-laws every year.

A larger perspective on the Sedna story draws together all of humanity
from the view of planet Earth and brings into focus not only the current issue
of widespread anti-female violence on our planet, but deeper possibilities for
solutions to it. On November 14, 2003, astronomers at observatories located in
Hawaii, Chile, California, and Connecticut discovered a dwarf planet at the
far reaches of our solar system. They named the planet Sedna because it “is
the coldest, most distant place” like the place where Goddess Sedna is thought
to live at the bottom of the frigid Arctic Ocean. Astronomers note that “Sedna
has an exceptionally elongated [egg-shaped] orbit, and takes approximately
11,400 years to return to its closest approach to the Sun.” Sedna has the longest
orbit of any planet known to humanity.
Philosophers of the stars interpret the discovery of the planet Sedna as a
pivotal sign to people on our planet. They understand Sedna’s appearance to
astronomers on Earth as signaling a time of awakening to both the plight of
women and girls and to the transcendence of that status. Interpreters of celestial
movements understand that Sedna is calling in an intense surge toward
the protection and flourishing of girls and women from a millennia-old subjugated status to one of reclamation. What women and girls are reclaiming
in this process is our status of centrality and sacredness in the web of life on
Earth. The last time the planet Sedna was closest to Earth was at the “end of
the last Ice Age . . . called the Neolithic revolution [that] involved the widescale
transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering
to one of agriculture and settlement, making a growth in population
possible.” The planet Sedna is drawing ever closer to Earth and will return to her
nearest orbit this century. What growth will Sedna bring to our planet this
time? What seeds can we leave here now for girls and women in the rising
generations so Family Mobbing is nothing more than a memory? The power
for change is in our hands.