her children and herself. She had to send her childrenaway and returned to live with her parents. One day, abird, disguised as a man, sought Sedna in marriage. Sheaccepted and went to live with him. But soon Sedna dis-covered that her new husband was not a man but only afulmar. When Sedna’s father visited her, he convincedSedna to leave with him in his boat. Unfortunately thefulmar caught them, and with his wings created an enor-mous storm, which threatened to overturn the boat. Terri-fied, Sedna’s father tried to throw the girl overboard to herhusband, but she grasped the boat’s side. In fear, thefather cut off Sedna’s fingers until she fell into the sea. Itis said that Sedna resides at the bottom of the sea with theseals and other sea animals that were created from herfingers.

In contrast to the other sea goddesses, Sedna is notdepicted as beautiful. Her hair and body gets dirty andugly when humans break taboos or behave in bad ways.Then she holds the animals back and sends storms or dis-eases. Therefore a shaman will undertake an underwaterjourney to comb her hair and wash her after he hasdefeated her in a fight. This causes her to let the animalsgo. More recent research revealed that this shaman canalso be a woman. In this case, the interpretation of symboli-cal sexual subjugation of women (by male shamans)(Zumwalt 1984) becomes obsolete, and the fertility as wellas the moralistic aspect of Sedna comes more to the fore.In her image, the behavior of people and the cycles ofnature, the weather and the fertility of the animals, areclosely connected.

Indonesia: Ratu KidulRatu Kidul is the Queen or Goddess of Java’s SouthernOcean. She is the ruler of all spirits, and she appears in theold texts and in the oral traditions of both the Javanesecourts and ordinary people. In contrast to the above-mentioned figures, she is not first and foremost a mothergoddess in connection with fertility but her central charac-teristic is the legitimization of political power. From theearly seventeenth century onward, she has always beenregarded as the consort of the Sultan (from the eighteenthcentury onward, of the Sultans of both Surakarta andYogyakarta), supporting him and defending his realm.Implicitly the marriage meant that the ruler was approvedand sanctioned by the primordial powers of the Sea. Thesignificance of this relationship has been waning alongwith the declining positions of these courts in present-dayJava. On the other hand, at present, ordinary people canand do ask her for help with all kinds of troubles. Spiritualand material goals become inseparable. Ratu Kidul is anambiguous figure too: she can be the source of luck, wel-fare and healing as well as of illness, death and destruc-tion. There are manifold adaptations to both modern lifeand Islam in imaginations of her, and the quality of herpersona depends on the context in which it is presented.

Nevertheless Javanese popular belief in Ratu Kidul is stillvery vivid.

Judith Schlehe

Further ReadingDrewal, Henry John. “Mermaids, Mirrors, and Snake

Charmers: Igbo Mami Wata Shrines.” African Arts 21(1988), 38–45.

Jell-Bahlsen, Sabine. “Eze Mmiri Di Egwu, The WaterMonarch is Awesome: Reconsidering the MammyWater Myths.” In F. Kaplan, ed. Queens, QueenMothers, Priestesses, and Power. New York: New YorkAcademy of Sciences, 1997, 103–34.

Zumwalt, Rosemary. “The Sea Spirit of the Central Eskimoand Her Relationship to the Living: A Delicate Bal-ance.” In Genevieve Calame-Griaule, et al., eds. LeConte, Pourquoi? Comment? Paris: Centre National dela Recherche Scientifique, 1984, 277–93.

See also: Candomblé of Brazíl; Divine Waters of theOru-Igbo (Southeastern Nigeria); Inuit; Rainbow Serpent(North Wellesley Islands, Australia); Serpents andDragons; Umbanda; Water Spirits and IndigenousEcological Management (South Africa).

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society – See Bio-centric Religion – A Call For; Watson, Paul – and the SeaShepherd Conservation Society.

Seattle (Sealth), Chief (ca. 1790–1866)

Chief Sealth (or Seattle as he is commonly called today)was an influential chief of the Salish-speaking indigenouspeoples whose lands included the Puget Sound region ofwhat is now Washington State. Born sometime around1790 from a Duwamish mother and a Suquamish father,and dying in 1866, this namesake of present-day Seattlewas chief during the coming of the “Boston Men” (Ameri-can-European settlers from the east coast of the UnitedStates), and maintained mostly cordial relations with themthroughout his life. By nearly all early accounts, Sealthwas an able chief and spokesman for the Salish, whoseexistence centered on the rich tidelands and estuaries thatsurrounded Puget Sound.

However, his fame today – especially in popular culture– is due mainly to the modern environmental movement,specifically to their appropriation and revision of a speechSealth allegedly gave along the Seattle waterfront, prob-ably in 1854. The earliest account of the speech, recordedby Henry Smith in the Seattle Sunday Star in 1887, comesfrom Smith’s recollections and diary fragments – the latternever found. In Smith’s account, Sealth contrasts thewhite culture with his own: the former apparently favored

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by God, the latter rejected, with the white religion given byan “angry God” and hence incomprehensible to his andother tribes.

Most pointedly, the speech records Sealth as contrast-ing the Christianity of the whites (with its stark separationof Heaven from Earth) with his tradition’s reverence forthe land, hallowed by the very real presence of his people’sancestors. Regarding these sacred ties between the ances-tors and the tribe’s land, the chief warns: “the dead are notaltogether powerless.”

The modern legend of Chief Seattle and his “Speech,”however, is not primarily due to Smith’s account – with itsauthentic Salish ties between Earth and religion – but dueto significant embellishments added by whites more than acentury later, most notably from the pens of poets andscreenwriters. In the past thirty years or so, in fact, manyrevisionist versions of Sealth’s speech have appeared:quoted at Earth Day celebrations, highlighted at a World’sFair, used by political parties and “Green” political candi-dates, appearing in a Smithsonian exhibit, and pennedeven into children’s books. Thanks to the massive informa-tion-exchange capabilities of the Internet, Sealth’s speech– in seemingly infinite variations – is everywhere, fromwebsites touting survivalist themes, to the home webpages of indigenous peoples.

In most of these accounts, Sealth is portrayed as fun-damentally questioning not only an upcoming treaty withthe U.S. government, but the very notion of private prop-erty itself: “How can we buy or sell the sky?” He alsobemoans witnessing the “slaughter of the buffalo,” despitethe fact that bison are not indigenous to the PacificNorthwest, and the great slaughter of buffalo would notoccur until a decade or more after Sealth’s death. Thus,most scholars acknowledge that much of the text of “ChiefSeattle’s Speech” was in all probability not uttered bySealth along the Puget Sound waterfront in 1854. Smithhimself was known as something of a poet, and in theVictorian era it was common for writers to add rhetoricalflourishes as they saw fit; but unless authentic documentsare forthcoming, we are likely never to learn what exactlyChief Sealth uttered that so impressed Henry Smith.

Despite the difficulties in determining where Sealth’swords stop and modern embellishments begin, ChiefSealth and his “speech” remain powerful and influentialfor two significant reasons. First, the authentic core of hisspeech points toward a land ethic and religious traditionwhich refuse to objectify nature, and which count eco-logical respect as a matter of course.

Second, the appropriation and adaptation of Sealth’spowerful words, and the linkage of this text to the modernenvironmental movement, are reminders of the ever-present human impulse toward religious syncretism, thecombination or synthesis of different elements from twoor more seemingly disparate traditions. Many NativeAmericans are angry at how some groups of the majority

culture have employed Sealth’s speech, lifting it out of thespecific Duwamish and Salish cultures from which it came.They view this appropriation as yet another example oftheft. Others, however, look at the resultant text, not pri-marily in terms of historical accuracy, but of whether itexpresses the truth of the results of persistent environ-mental degradation.

Michael McKenzie

Further ReadingBierwert, Crisca. “Remembering Chief Seattle.” American

Indian Quarterly 22:3 (1998), 280.Furtwangler, Albert. Answering Chief Seattle. Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1997.See also: Indigenous Environmental Network; IndigenousReligions and Cultural Borrowing; Manifest Destiny;Mother Earth; Radical Environmentalism; ReligiousEnvironmentalist Paradigm.

Sedona

One of the most celebrated of New Age “power spots,” thissmall town in scenic north-central Arizona has been a hubof New Age and metaphysical activities since at least thelate 1970s, when California-based psychic and self-helpguru Dick Sutphen began touting it as a power center andpsychic Page Bryant identified seven specific “energy vor-texes” in the area. Stories about extraordinary phenomenaand about the area’s healing energies circulated rapidlythrough the 1980s, and by the early 1990s the number ofhealing centers, New Age bookstores, crystal shops, andpsychic channelers had multiplied far out of proportion tothe town’s population of ten thousand or so. Groups basedin the area have included ECKankar, the Rainbow RayFocus Group, the Aquarian Concepts Community, theCenter for Advanced Energy Healing, and the AquarianEducational Foundation.

Cradled in its other-worldly red rock surroundings, thetown has become a spiritual melting pot of New Age mil-lenarianism, neo-shamanic Earth spirituality, and post-traditional metaphysical and Theosophical occultism.Some of Sedona’s channelers regularly contribute to thejournal Sedona: Journal of Emergence, which has becomethe flagship of the American channeling community, withits millenarian beliefs in extraterrestrial contact, interdi-mensional portals, light-bodies and stargates. For some ofSedona’s psychics and ecospiritualists, the colorful rockformations, steep-walled canyons, and piñon pine-juniperforests that surround the town are an energetically activeand psychically catalytic wilderness rich with mysteriousenergy “portals” and spiritual presences. At the same time,the rate of real estate and tourist development has turnedSedona into one of the prime tourist sites of the U.S.

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