BOAS1890-001 - ethnographic attestation
Shuswap / Secwepemc (Kamloops division)
Canada - Kamloops, Thompson River, interior British Columbia - North America - Plateau
Weather / fertility magic
skumku'mq-sisilt (Secwepemctsin), 'young grizzly bears' - the word for twins, not for the instrument.
Among the Shuswap of the Thompson River country, weather was the business of twins. A woman who bore them took her children to a hut on a mountain slope above a creek and stayed there until they could walk, and they were never to enter the village, or her other children would die. Twins were called skumku'mq-sisilt, young grizzly bears, and the power that came with the birth stayed with them for life. They could make good weather and bad, and each kind of weather had its own technique. For rain they filled a small basket with water and threw it into the air. For storm they strewed down on the ends of spruce branches. For clear weather they took a small stick with a string tied to the end of it and a small flat piece of wood tied to the end of the string, and they shook it. Boas never says the thing made a noise, and never gives it a name; 'a kind of bull-roarer' is Lévi-Strauss's identification, not his. The rest of the twins' childhood was of a piece: the mother watched them at play to learn whether her husband was killing anything — success if they tumbled about biting at each other, an empty-handed return if they lay quiet.
For making clear weather they use a small stick, to the end of which a string is tied. A small flat piece of wood is attached to the end of the string, and this implement is shaken.
Franz Boas, Sixth Report on the North-Western Tribes of Canada (BAAS, 1890), printed p. 644
- Object
- A small stick with a string tied to its end and a small flat piece of wood attached to the end of the string - a handled blade-on-cord, the standard handled bullroarer form of this region. Boas gives no dimensions and no local name for it, and he never uses the word bullroarer.
- Function
- Weather control by twins. Twins, called skumku'mq-sisilt, 'young grizzly bears,' are held to be supernaturally powerful for life and to make good and bad weather; this implement is the clear-weather instrument in a three-part kit - water flung from a small basket for rain, this shaken for clear weather, down strewn on the ends of spruce branches for storm.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - Kamloops, British Columbia - Boas states 'The information contained in the following chapter has been collected at Kamloops,' so this is the locality of the informants, not a sounding site. Shuswap territory is very much larger.
- Source location
Page references
printed p. 644 (offprint folio 92)
- Weather magic