Inuit tradition holds that animals, weather, places and some objects possess an inua, an indwelling person or owner. The word is built on the root for person, and the concept is closer to saying that the thing has an inside that can be addressed than to saying it has a soul in the Christian sense. A seal is a person of a different kind, and it is aware of how it is handled.
This is the basis of the large body of rules that governed Inuit life, usually described in English as taboos. Sea animals and land animals were kept apart: caribou and seal were not to be sewn or eaten together, and work on caribou skins was forbidden while sea-mammal hunting was underway. Fresh water was offered to a killed seal, because the animal was understood to thirst. The rules were numerous, regionally variable and taken with great seriousness, because the consequence of breaking them was not personal guilt but collective hunger: offended animals withdraw, and everyone starves.
The best known figure is the woman at the bottom of the sea, called Sedna in the literature and Nuliajuk or Takannaaluk among others in Inuit usage. The narrative varies but commonly runs that a girl was thrown from a boat by her father, clung to the gunwale, had her fingers cut off, and sank, and that her severed fingers became the seals, whales and walrus. She holds the sea animals, and when human wrongdoing accumulates it tangles and fouls her hair, which she cannot comb because she has no fingers. The animals stay with her and the hunt fails.
Sila is a wider and harder concept: air, weather, the outside, and something like the intelligence of the world. The moon is a male figure paired in narrative with the sun, his sister, and is associated with game and with the dead. Naming ties this together: a child given the name of a recently dead relative carries something of that person, and is addressed by the kin term appropriate to the namesake rather than to the child. That practice is widespread among Inuit today.