Now dwelling at the bottom of the sea, Sedna, known by many different names depending on the community, including Nuliajuk and Arnakuaggsaq among others, is understood to control whether hunters succeed or starve, since the sea mammals will not release themselves to be hunted if she is angry, most often because human wrongdoing, particularly the breaking of taboos surrounding the treatment of animals or the dead, has tangled or dirtied her long hair, which she cannot comb herself since her fingers were cut away in the original betrayal.
To restore good hunting, a shaman, an angakkuq, must undertake a dangerous spirit journey down to Sedna's undersea house, calm her, and comb and braid her hair, in a ritual documented in detail by the Danish Greenlandic explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen during the Fifth Thule Expedition of the 1920s, one of the most extensive ethnographic surveys of Inuit religious life ever conducted across the Canadian Arctic. The myth functions simultaneously as an origin account for marine mammals, a moral framework tying good or bad hunting fortune directly to proper human conduct, and a justification for the angakkuq's specialized ritual role as the one person able to travel to Sedna and negotiate on the community's behalf, making the story inseparable in practice from the religious specialists whose authority it explains and sustains.