Qailertetang

Sources do not provide a cosmogonic birth narrative for Qailertetang. Rather, she is presented as a sea-dwelling woman who lives at the bottom of the sea in the company of seals, whales, and other sea creatures and who shares that realm with the better-known sea-mother Sedna. In practice Qailertetang is also embodied in community enactments—masked, costumed figures in Quviasukvik rites—and is served by shamans before hunts on behalf of the community, indicating an origin in both mythic maritime domain and ritual practice.

Mythically Qailertetang is described as a large woman of very heavy limbs. In ritual enactment two gigantic qailertetang figures are represented by people wearing heavy boots, several pairs of breeches, a woman's overjacket, and tattooed sealskin masks; they carry seal spears and scrapers and bear an inflated buoy of sealskin on their back. After the staged revival the sealskin buoy is filled with water and used as a divinatory object.

In myth Qailertetang cares for animals and for fishers and hunters and exerts control over weather, capacities that position her as a mediator of marine resources and environmental conditions critical to coastal Inuit subsistence. Ritually the qailertetang pair off men and women, chase them to a woman's hut to be paired as temporary couples, go to the shore to invoke the north wind for good weather and to ward off the unfavorable south wind, submit to a staged attack and apparent killing and revival, and provide divinatory murmurs from water-filled sealskins that inquirers interpret to learn about hunting success and other future events. Shamans also serve Qailertetang (and Sedna) on behalf of the tribe before hunts.