The mother of sea mammals in Inuit tradition, ruling the animals hunters depend on from the cold floor of the ocean.
Documented
Recorded across the Arctic
Versions of the Sedna story were collected from Greenland to Alaska in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, notably by Boas among the Central Inuit. The shaman's journey to comb her tangled hair and release the animals is the tradition's ritual core.
Assessment: Documented across a vast area with consistent structure. The ocean's management had a name and an address.
Stories
The fingers in the water
The story: thrown from her father's boat, the girl clings to the gunwale; he cuts her fingers joint by joint, and each falls into the sea as a seal, a walrus, a whale. Betrayal above the ice becomes abundance below it.
Assessment: One of the starkest origin tales in the circumpolar record. The food is family, and the family was wronged.
Interesting claims
She now has a planet
The modern layer: in 2003 astronomers named a distant dwarf planet Sedna, the coldest named object in the solar system, after the goddess of the coldest sea. Mythology as the International Astronomical Union's naming convention.
Assessment: Documented nomenclature. The goddess's jurisdiction officially extends past Neptune's orbit.
Sources and further reading
Boas, The Central Eskimo (1888)
Arctic tale variants, Greenland to Alaska collections
IAU naming citation, 90377 Sedna (2003)
Shamanic journey accounts in Knud Rasmussen's expeditions
Worth asking
When science names its hardware after gods, which archive owns the name?