DRUCKER1950-002 - ethnographic attestation
Tsishaat bullroarer
Canada - Barkley Sound and lower Alberni Canal, Vancouver Island - North America - Northwest Coast
Sacred / spirit
Source term: bullroarer
Barkley Sound people who moved up the Alberni Canal in early historic times, the Tsishaat swung the bullroarer from a handle in the Wolf Dance and did not hand it to children. Theirs is the other side of a well-documented exchange: their Hupachisat neighbours upriver had taken the whole Wolf Dance, roarer included, from Nootkan tribes like this one within living memory. On this side of it the instrument carries no date at all.
856. Ceremonial usage. ... NH, NT, NC, N2: The instrument was used in the Wolf Dance.
Philip Drucker, Culture Element Distributions: XXVI, Northwest Coast (1950), pp. 199, 268.
- Object
- A wooden slat swung on a cord fastened to a handle, the standard form all along this coast. Neither dimensions nor material recorded.
- Function
- Sounded in the Wolf Dance; not a child's toy.
- Source
- Philip Drucker, Culture Element Distributions: XXVI, Northwest Coast, University of California Anthropological Records 9:3 (Berkeley, 1950). Element 854 Bullroarer with sub-elements 855 With handle, 856 Ceremonial usage, 857 Toy, printed p. 199; ethnographic notes printed p. 268
- Source location
Page references
printed p. 199, elements 854-857; notes printed p. 268
- Source confidence
- medium Barkley Sound, Vancouver Island -- territory anchor, not a findspot.
- Initiation rite