Iqaluit (Mar 22/04) - Inuit are scratching their heads after hearing the recent announcement that a new planetoid (not large enough to be a planet) discovered by NASA in November will be named "Sedna" after an Inuit goddess of the ocean.

"Inuit have never heard of Sedna," said Peter Irniq, the commissioner of Nunavut.

The name Sedna was taken from Arctic mythology, a story that exists in books, but does not exist in actual Inuit storytelling.

"I don't know where they got it," said Irniq. "We do not have that word in our vocabulary."

Jack Anawak, former MLA for Rankin Inlet, was also puzzled by the name choice.

"It's just another example of something getting done without consulting with Inuit. It is something we never heard about," said Anawak. "Nuliajuk is the one we always heard about."

Irniq explained that Nuliajuk is the name of the woman in the story he knows.

The story centers on the beautiful young woman -- Nuliajuk in Inuit storytelling -- who gets thrown into the sea by her father and her body creates all the sea life, like whales, walruses and seals that help Inuit survive.

Not only is the name "Sedna" an incorrect one for Inuit, but Irniq said with a laugh that the name of a sea goddess is an odd choice for a planetoid which is 16 billion kilometres from the sun and the furthest known object in the solar system.

NASA-funded researchers named the planet-like object Sedna because temperatures never rise above -240 C.

It is the farthest object from the sun, at 130 billion km away, and the coldest known region of our solar system.

"Long ago, there were no seals or walruses for Eskimos to hunt. There were reindeer and birds and wolves but there were no animals in the sea. There was at that time, an Eskimo girl called Sedna who lived with her father in an igloo by the seashore. Sedna was beautiful and she was courted by men from her own village and by others who came from faraway lands. But none of these men pleased her and she refused to marry."

-- From the book, "The Day Tuk Became a Hunter and Other Eskimo stories." Retold by Ronald Melzack. McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1967.