The Bullroarer Atlas

BOURKE1892-001 - ethnographic attestation

Tusayan / Walpi / Hopi

United States - Walpi, Tusayan - Hopi mesas, Arizona - North America

Sacred / spirit

Hopi bull-roarer with snake-lightning painting, Mishongnovi, Arizona — British Museum, Am1891,0612.21.
Hopi bull-roarer with snake-lightning painting, Mishongnovi, Arizona — British Museum, Am1891,0612.21. © The Trustees of the British Museum, Am1891,0612.21 CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source
Wick-Ah-Te-Wah in Hopi Snake Dance costume, holding a lightning-snake bullroarer in his right hand, Keams Canyon, 1898.
Wick-Ah-Te-Wah in Hopi Snake Dance costume, holding a lightning-snake bullroarer in his right hand, Keams Canyon, 1898. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge (P.8955.ACH1); E. A. Burbank, 1898 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Image source
Antelope priests enter Walpi’s plaza on August 21, 1897, with Copelli at the head of the line. The bullroarer is not visible in Ben Wittick’s...
Representative image. Antelope priests enter Walpi’s plaza on August 21, 1897, with Copelli at the head of the line. The bullroarer is not visible in Ben Wittick’s photograph. Ben Wittick, ‘Snake dance at Hualpi, Moqui Indian Village, Arizona, Aug. 21st 1897’ (Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-113099) Public domain Image source
Snake priests gather around the kisi at Walpi in 1905. The bullroarer is not visible in this stereograph.
Representative image. Snake priests gather around the kisi at Walpi in 1905. The bullroarer is not visible in this stereograph. ‘The snake dance. The snake priests entering,’ Walpi, 1905 (Library of Congress, LC-DIG-stereo-1s51060) Public domain Image source
A 1921 newspaper feature announcing that year’s Walpi Snake Dance: four ritual photographs supplied by the sculptor Emery Kopta, with his bust...
Representative image. A 1921 newspaper feature announcing that year’s Walpi Snake Dance: four ritual photographs supplied by the sculptor Emery Kopta, with his bust of Walpi’s Snake chief at center. The paper does not identify where the four photographs were taken, and no bullroarer is visible. The Arizona Republican, August 21, 1921, p. 7; photographs supplied by Emery Kopta Public domain Image source

tovokìnpi Hopi (Third Mesa dialect)

bull-roarer

The Walpi Snake Dance re-enacts Tiyo’s journey to the underworld, where Spider Woman guided him into the kiva of the Snake people and he learned the songs and prayers that bring corn and rain. In 1901 a newly initiated boy no more than five stopped in the procession and sounded a flat wooden bullroarer; its “miniature thunder clap” mingled with the Antelope priests’ rain-like rattles. At critical moments a Bow-priesthood warrior sounded the same thunder, calling wind and rain to the crops.

The medicine-men twirled it rapidly, and with a uniform motion, about the head and from front to rear, and succeeded in faithfully imitating the sound of a gust of rain-laden wind. As explained to me by one of the medicine-men, by making this sound they compelled the wind and rain to come to the aid of the crops.

Bourke 1892, The Medicine-Men of the Apache, Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, p. 476
Object
Flat wooden Walpi bullroarer on a long cord, sounded by a newly initiated boy and by the Bow-priesthood warrior in the Snake Dance.
Function
Twirled by the kalektaka warrior trailing the Antelope priests in the Walpi Snake dance, imitating rain-laden wind and the thunder that accompanies the rain, to compel wind and rain to aid the crops
Map confidence
medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or broad region in Bourke
Source location
Bourke 1892:476-478; Fewkes 1897:298, 302-304; Andrus 1901:10

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