Inuit myth enforces hunting restraint by making sea creatures sacred descendants of Sedna.

Evidence

Sedna herself sank down to the bottom of the sea and became its powerful ruler — the Mother of the Sea-Beasts, the great spirit who controls all the sea-animals. And here is the crucial part for the Inuit: because the sea-creatures are Sedna’s own transformed fingers, her children, she watches over them, and she must be RESPECTED and honored by the hunters. If people grow greedy or wasteful, or break the rules of respect toward the animals they hunt, Sedna becomes angry and withholds the sea-creatures — keeping them down in the deep with her, so that the hunters find nothing and the people starve. — , A Year of World Stories, 15500

Categorization

• XREF: Links to broader conservation-etiquette in indigenous hunting traditions and to book’s earlier theme of respect for the hunted.