and spiritual power, and Indigenous principles of reciprocity evident in oceanic representations (fig. 1).^[i] Throughout her nearly fifty-year career, Arnaktauyok has engaged in art-making as a way of nurturing the living history, cultural knowledge, and values of Inuit, known collectively as Inuit Quajimajatuqangit.^[ii] In her words, “I try to use stories that describe the Inuit world in ancient times, because to me that means they are more accurate. I guess I am trying to show how Inuit used to think in early times.”^[iii] Arnaktauyok looked to these narratives amid the significant disruption to Inuit ways of life as a result of colonization.^[iv] Her story of Sedna indicates that this “ancient” thinking has a vital role to play in the present. Arnaktauyok was born in 1946 in a camp at Maniituq, sixty miles from the hamlet of Igloolik on the Melville Peninsula in Northern Canada. Her birthplace is now part of the Inuit territory known as Nunavut, designated by the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement in 1993—the largest Indigenous land claim settlement in Canadian history.^[v] She pursued formal artistic training through a variety of programs, including fine arts at the University of Manitoba School of Art and commercial art at the Pembroke Campus of Algonquin College. Beginning in the 1990s, she also began to work in etching, inspired by a printmaking course she took with Kyra Fischer at Aurora College in Yellowknife.^[vi]  Arnaktauyok engages in a meticulous research process for each picture that is as often as intricate as her drawing style, asserting: “When I draw legends I try to follow the story exactly.”^[vii] The artist refers to oral histories and Western ethnographic publications alike, deriving inspiration from their idiosyncrasies. She explains, “I read as much as I can about the Inuit. Also, because there are different versions of the same story from different communities from east to west, the stories always change. . . . We didn’t have a written language, and oral history changes as time passes. That’s why I’ve created images of some stories quite a few times,

^[i] Wight, Creation and Transformation, 3. In her essay “The Oceanic Imagination,” Birgit Däwes applies a trans-Indigenous methodology that gives rise to this interpretation of Indigenous perspectives as sharing “complex webs of signification” in relation to the ocean. Däwes locates these integrative outlooks in Indigenous works of art and literature that she calls “maritime semiologies.” See Birgit Däwes, “The Oceanic Imagination: Canadian and Australian Contributions to a Trans-Indigenous Methodology,” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 34:2 (2014): 67. For a selection of works featuring the Sedna myth in Arnaktauyok’s oeuvre, see pages 122–133 of Arnaktauyok and Oh, My Name is Arnaktauyok.

^[ii] In an interview between Arnaktauyok and Darlene Coward Wight, Curator of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, in November of 1997, Wight remarked, “It sounds like you are interested in history,” to which the artist responded, “Yes, maybe, because I am living it.” Darlene Coward Wight, Germaine Arnaktauyok (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1997), 23. This notion of a living history is at the core of Inuit Quajimajatuqangit (IQ), which is defined by Inuit elders as a “living technology” of knowledge. IQ is of such central importance to Inuit that it serves as a mandate for policies and programs enacted by the Government of Nunavut. According to Heather Igloliorte, IQ “directly translates to ‘that which Inuit have always known to be true,’ referring not only to the past but also the present and future.” See Heather Igloliorte, “Arctic Culture / Global Indigeneity” in Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada, eds. Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson (McGill: Queen’s University Press, 2014), 151.

^[iii] Quoted in Wight, Germaine Arnaktauyok, 23.

^[iv] For a discussion of the interrelated issues of colonization and sovereignty in the Arctic, see Heather Igloliorte, “The Inuit of Our Imagination,” in Inuit Modern, ed. Gerald McMaster (Ontario: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010), 41–47.

^[v] Arnaktauyok and Oh, 19. For more information on the formation of Nunavut, see Terry Fenge, “Managing the Arctic Ocean in Nunavut: The Inuit Land-Claim Settlement,” in The Sea Has Many Voices: Oceans Policy for a Complex World, ed. Cynthia Lamson (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 185–206.

^[vi] Wight, Germaine Arnaktauyok, 6–7.

^[vii] Quoted in ibid., 23; Wight, Creation and Transformation, 166.

but they are all done differently.”^[i] Arnaktauyok, like many other Inuit artists, is compelled by the fluidity and heterogeneity of oral history, which engenders an equally vibrant array of pictorial representations. In Fish Man and Fish Woman, Arnaktauyok visualizes a story of sustenance and transformation. In her description of a comparable drawing from 1999 entitled A Hungry Couple Who Became Fish, the artist relays a version of the narrative: “There was an old couple who were starving. They were trying to fish, but the fish were ignoring their bait and there was nothing they could do. That’s when they said ‘Let’s become fish.’ So they jumped into the water and became fish. . . . It’s a very nice story.”^[ii] Arnaktauyok condenses the legend’s events into a single pictorial narrative in the 1980 depiction. In the upper register of the composition, the husband and wife kneel alongside a narrow crack in the ice, dangling their fish hooks to no avail. In the lower, larger register, the couple is shown in the midst of their shape-shifting. Their heads, arms, and torsos still appear human, sporting anoraks (parkas), while their legs have fully morphed into fish tails. Arnaktauyok employs an exceptionally fine-tipped pen in order to render exquisite details such as the individual parka fringes, the fine lines of the caudal fins, and each discrete scale. The artist achieves masterful tonal and textural gradations through dense layers of thin, coiled lines, or “squiggles,” as she calls them (notably apparent in the darker portions of the parkas).^[iii] In this transformation story, the human protagonists become the very animals that they seek, and in so doing, perform a kind of ancestral return. Irene Avaalaaqiaq Tiktaalaaq (b. 1941, Baker Lake), one of Arnaktauyok’s contemporaries, relates an anecdote that again features the theme of survival-driven transmutation: “Three women said, ‘Let’s go fishing.’ So they transformed themselves fish. . . . The theme of the story is about the three women transforming

^[i] Arnaktauyok and Oh, 117; Wight, Arnaktauyok, 23.

^[ii] Arnaktauyok and Oh, 60.

^[iii] Wight, Arnaktauyok, 3. Wight comments on the formal resemblance between Arnaktauyok’s “squiggles” and printmaking: “The resulting texture can sometimes make a drawing look like an engraving, although this drawing technique has developed over the years and was not influenced by prints. However, it is fitting that she has learned to translate her original work into the medium of etching, which creates the tonal effects that are now integral to her art.”

into different animals because they were hungry.”^[i] Religious studies scholar Kimberly C. Patton emphasizes the fact that the sea constitutes the “original home and matrix” for all humans, “the source from which our marine ancestors evolved millions of years ago, and yet carry still within us.”^[ii] Although the fetal gill slits that develop in the womb are only temporary, the salinity of human blood equals that of the sea for the duration of an individual’s life.^[iii] For these reasons, according to Patton, “we seem to remain marine creatures.”^[iv] Arnaktauyok’s Fish Man and Fish Woman evokes these productive connections and demonstrates a keen awareness of humans’ amphibious origins. With this in mind, it is possible to surmise that the couple is not so much changing into these forms as revisiting them, thereby also emblematizing Indigenous notions of human-animal kinship. The man and woman leave behind both their human forms and their terrestrial existence, and Arnaktauyok takes great care in illuminating the transformational impacts of their descent into the ocean—a stunning move that recalls the artist’s own childhood plunge. Their aquatic transition implicitly brings them under the purview of Sedna, “the Mother of the Sea Animals.”^[v] Arnaktauyok outlines a vivid summary of the Sedna myth: Sedna was a young girl who refused to marry. One day she was taken away by what she   thought was a very handsome man. He was actually a petrel, and since the petrels live on          a cliff, that’s where she was taken. She found out he was a bird by looking closely at his             eyes. He had goggles so she wouldn’t see, but she noticed that he had very inhuman eyes. She had to get away and was able to climb down the cliff. By that time her father and two    brothers were looking for her. They found her and decided to take her home. When the petrel saw them taking his wife in a boat, he flapped his wings and made a big storm. They were so afraid that they threw the young girl in the ocean. She came back and she held on the side of the boat. One of them hit her knuckles with an oar and the fingertips fell off into the water. They turned into different sea animals. When Sedna’s fingers were cut off, she fell to the bottom of the sea, where she lived as a powerful sea goddess and had control over all the animals.^[vi] Many Inuit women have identified with Sedna on the basis of her maternal, life-giving abilities.^[vii] For example, Peah Kisa, an Inuit woman from Pangnirtung, concludes her chronicle of “The

^[i] Irene Avaalaaqiaq Tiktaalaaq relayed this tale in an interview with Sally Qimmiu’naaq Webster in 2005 in order to elucidate the figures in her 2000 textile hanging, Women and Animals Transforming. Excerpts are transcribed in Ingo Hessel, Arctic Spirit: Inuit Art from the Albrecht Collection at the Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ: Heard Museum, 2006), 123.

^[ii] Kimberly C. Patton, The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils: Modern Marine Pollution and the Ancient Cathartic Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3.

^[iii] Ibid.

^[iv] Ibid. James Hamilton-Paterson echoes this relation, asserting that “the salt which is in seawater is in our blood and tears and sweat.” Hamilton-Paterson, Seven-Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds (London: Hutchinson, 1992), 5.

^[v] Daniel Merkur, Powers Which We Do Not Know: The Gods and Spirits of the Inuit (Moscow: University of Idaho, 1991), 97.

^[vi] Quoted in Wight, Arnaktauyok, 9. Arnaktauyok’s iteration of the Sedna myth echoes the one articulated by Rachel Attiquq Qitsualik in “The Problem with Sedna.”

^[vii] Janet Mancini Billson and Kyra Mancini, Inuit Women: Their Powerful Spirit in a Century of Change (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 68. For information on the role of women in contemporary Inuit society, see Janet Mancini Billson, Keepers of the Culture: The Power of Tradition in Women’s Lives (Ottawa: Penumbra Press, 1999).

Woman of the Waves” by saying: “Women are the source of life for Inuit.”^[i] Kisa’s interpretation recognizes an intrinsic bond between women and Sedna through their shared status as vital progenitors of both life and culture. As art historian Janet Catherine Berlo similarly observes, Sedna stories are “rich in meaning and metaphors” for “female power, autonomy, and creativity.”^[ii] In some versions of the story, Sedna’s severed fingers are not the only corporeal elements to undergo visceral transformation. Indeed, the trauma of Sedna’s ordeal leaves an additional, indelible mark upon her person, one which further links her with marine life—her legs are knitted together into a formidable tail, and she is variously depicted by Inuit artists as half woman and half fish, seal, or whale.^[iii] Sedna, one of the most prolifically discussed and represented spiritual beings in Native North America, goes by many different names which usually refer to her assorted attributes or location.^[iv] Frédéric Laugrand, Jarich Oosten, and Kimberly C. Patton enumerate these various regional monikers, including Takánakapsâluk or Takannaaluk, “The [Terrible] One Down There” by Iglulingmiut; Nuliajuk, “The Ever-Copulating One” by Nattilingmiut; Uinigumasuittuq, “The One Who Did Not Want to Have a Husband”; and Nerrivik, or “Food Dish” by Inughuit (Greenlandic Inuit).^[v] Arnaktauyok explains, “In the Igloolik area they call Sedna, the sea goddess, Takannaaluk. . . . I don’t know how the name ‘Sedna’ became so common, but we are now stuck with it.”^[vi] Inuk folklorist Rachel Attituq Qitsualik clarifies that “Sedna” is actually the result of “a distortion of the Inuktitut word ‘sanna,’ meaning ‘down there.’”^[vii] This broad diversity of titles speaks to the centrality and extent of the Sedna story in Inuit culture, and subsequently, its interconnection with myriad oral histories such as “Fish Man and Fish Woman.”

^[i] Quoted in Billson and Mancini, Inuit Women, 68.

^[ii] Janet Catherine Berlo, “Sedna Squared,” in Quilting Lessons: Notes from the Scrap Bag of a Writer and Quilter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 125.

^[iii] Patton, The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils, 86.

^[iv] Daniel Merkur emphasizes Sedna’s preeminence: “Within the comparative study of religions, she is perhaps the most frequently cited living example, anywhere in the world, of the type of goddess term potneia theiron, “Mistress of Animals,” after the epithet of the Greek Artemis,” Powers Which We Do Not Know, 97.

^[v] Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten, The Sea Woman: Sedna in Inuit Shamanism and Art in the Eastern Arctic (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2008), 20–21; Patton, 83–84. Patton further delineates the various ethnographic accounts which prominently feature Inuit mythic cycles of Sedna, including two of the earliest conducted by Danish ethnologists Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen in the late nineteenth century, and later ones by Diamond Jenness, Erik Holtveld, Inge Kleivan, Ake Hultkrantz, and, most recently, Daniel Merkur.

^[vi] Quoted in Wight, Creation and Transformation, 166.

^[vii] Rachel Attiquq Qitsualik, “A Matter of Courage,” Nunatsiaq News, September 15, 2000. Keavy Martin points out that this mistranslation is the result of Franz Boas’s erroneous recordings from his visit to the Uqqurmiut of southern Baffin Island. See Franz Boas, The Central Eskimo. Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 175; Martin, “Rescuing Sedna: Doorslamming, Fingerslicing, and the Moral of the Story,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 38:2 (2011): 189.

Sedna resides on the ocean floor in a watery domain called Adlivun.^[i] Despite being physically removed from earthly life, she remains intimately aware of human activity, to such a significant degree that she registers any and all instances of social transgression in her outward appearance.^[ii] Sedna’s displeasure is indexed primarily through her hair, which flies loose from her braid, becoming wild, snarled, and unclean. The consequences of these infractions exceed her own defilement, however. Her discomfort and fury also implicate the sea animals, who withhold themselves from the hunt, resulting in rampant starvation in human communities. In the belief of coastal Inuit populations, only a spiritual and intellectual leader, or angakkuq, can access Sedna (often by means of a trance) in order to placate her into releasing the sea beasts. The angakkuq fulfills this need through a combination of interrogation (in order to glean the nature of the human misdeeds that elicited her rage), as well as combing and re-braiding her hair.^[iii] This remedial braiding, according to Inuit carver Susie Silook, “is like a prayer.”^[iv] For Inuit, long, well-kept hair is redolent with spiritual meaning and connotes fertility and strength.^[v] Indeed, one’s tarniq, or soul, is intimately bound up in their hair.^[vi] Rasmussen observed that, among Iglulingmuit, “long hair means a strong soul. . . . It is customary therefore to wear the hair in sulap-a-tit, or plaits rolled into a knot over the ears; this keeps hold of the soul.”^[vii] Paradoxically, Sedna, despite her prowess, is incapable of this task; fingerless, she is unable to clean and tame her voluminous locks without the angakkuq’s intervention. Indigenous literature scholar Keavy Martin notes this underlying vulnerability: “(T)he figure Sedna exists in an uncertain position between power and victimization.”^[viii] Mary Pudlat (1923–2001) provides a feminist re-imagining of this state of affairs in her 1992 drawing Sednas Braiding Hair, another work in the Frederick and Lucy Herman Collection of Inuit Art (fig. 2). Here, Sedna has not only been doubled, but also healed; each being boasts

^[i] Ibid. Patton expands on the additional role of Adlivun as an underworld: “Adlivun is also one of the three destinations of the human dead, where a diseased soul spends a year or more with Sedna in a kind of purgatorial penance before traveling to Omiktu, heaven. Sedna is also the Mistress of the Dead; her role as keeper of the laws spans both human and animal realms, both the living and the dead.”

^[ii] For an in-depth discussion of taboos in Inuit culture, as well as their relation to Sedna and hunting protocol, see Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten, Inuit Shamanism and Christianity: Transitions and Transformations in the Twentieth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 113–119.

^[iii] According to Patton, “Polar Inuit shamans beautifully braid and tie back her hair, or, in the Copper Inuit version, comb and smooth it,” 95. Bernadette Driscoll explains the vital role played by the angakkuq “in maintaining the precarious balance between man and the spiritual aspect of nature.” See Driscoll, Uumajut: Animal Imagery in Inuit Art and Spiritual Culture (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1985), 34.

^[iv] Quoted in Berlo, “Sedna Squared,” 126.

^[v] Interestingly, Sedna’s mother, Lumaajuq, also underwent a dramatic, more total transformation into a narwhal, “her long braided hair” became “the tusk borne by this species of whale.” See Billson and Mancini, 68. ^[vi] Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten, The Sea Woman, 53; Patton, 95.

^[vii] Quoted in ibid., 53.

^[viii] Keavy Martin, “Rescuing Sedna,” 190.

hands that are fully formed and unmarred. Moreover, through her twinned presence and restored fingers, Sedna is empowered anew for the task of personal maintenance that had previously been beyond her ability. The Sedna on the right expertly braids the hair of her companion, who assists by holding it taut and steady. Arnaktauyok, too, renders the female figure in Fish Man and Fish Woman with immaculate braids, tied neatly together at the ends. It is significant that Arnaktauyok preserves this vestige of control and self-possession at the very moment of corporeal flux, thereby amplifying the intimate hybridity at play in the image. Arnaktauyok pictures a pair that is at once human and animal. In so doing, she envisions a form of resilience that is evocative of a broader Inuit cosmology, one which embraces a practice of reciprocity towards the very entity—the Arctic Ocean—that both threatens and sustains the people.^[i] This profound change does not diminish the fish couple’s power; rather, it is fortified through their acknowledgment of ecological interconnectedness and its complexity. Arnaktauyok’s drawing makes plain that any division between realms—land and water, human and animal—is by no means fixed. Inuit relations to the specific topography of the Arctic environment reinforces this fact. As Terry Fenge, former research director and senior negotiator for the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut, has explained, “Inuit use the offshore as an extension of the land” for the better part of each year, adopting the ice as a “convenient platform for transportation to and from hunting sites.”^[ii] In an age of climate change and rising sea levels, this line between water, ice, and land is becoming ever more indistinct, especially for Inuit communities.^[iii] As explored in this essay, Fish Man and Fish Woman engages a nuanced range of personal, spiritual, and scientific attitudes towards the ocean. In this way, the drawing evokes broader contemporary efforts to foster cross-cultural dialogues about climate change. As cultural historian and ethnologist Lioba Rossbach de Olmos stresses, the shared predicament of global warming “demands a pluralistic way of thinking,” one that accepts Western scientific formulations and Indigenous spiritual understandings of climate on equal terms.^[iv] Arnaktauyok’s composition offers a radical embrace of this dynamic approach through its acknowledgment of the inevitability of change and the value of processual thinking. To invoke the parameters of “Aboriginal knowledge” as espoused by James Youngblood Henderson once more: “[It] is not a description of reality but an understanding of the processes of ecological change and ever-changing insights about diverse patterns or styles of flux. . . . To see things as permanent is to be confused about everything: an alternative to that understanding is the need to create temporary harmonies through alliances and relationships among all forms and forces.”^[v] Arnaktauyok’s drawing visually echoes this sentiment, giving form to the ethical and relational dimensions of humanity’s ecological embedment—a worldview perpetuated through Sedna’s enduring legacy.

^[i] Lioba Rossbach de Olmos, “Religious Perspectives on Climate Change Among Indigenous Communities,” 211. In this chapter, de Olmos explores the merits of “ethnoclimatology,” a relatively recent discipline that brings together anthropology and climate science in order to advocate for “the general acceptance of a plurality of local interpretations and perceptions of global climate change challenges,” 202. In this vein, the author submits that “The strength of Indigenous knowledge and abilities lies precisely in the religious fundament, in the concern about equilibrium and the reciprocal relationship to nature,” 211. For an Inuit-specific study of climate change, in keeping with the principles of “ethnoclimatology,” see Timothy B. Leduc, “Sila Dialogues on Climate Change: Inuit Wisdom for a Cross-Cultural Interdisciplinarity,” Climactic Change 85 (2007): 237–250.

^[ii] Terry Fenge, “Managing the Arctic Ocean in Nunavut: The Inuit Land-Claim Settlement,” 187.

^[iii] For an account of the various experiences of and perspectives on climate change in the Arctic by Inuit elders, see José Gérin-Lajoie, Alain Cuerrier, and Laura Siegwart Collier, eds., “The Caribou Taste Different Now”: Inuit Elders Observe Climate Change (Nunavut: Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2015).

^[iv] Lioba Rossbach de Olmos, “Religious Perspectives on Climate Change Among Indigenous Communities: Questions and Challenges for Ethnological Research,” in Religion in Environmental and Climate Change: Suffering, Values, Lifestyles, ed. Dieter Gerten and Sigurd Bergmann (London: Continuum, 2012), 209.

^[v] Henderson, “Ayukpachi: Empowering Aboriginal Thought,” 265.