Tsishaat bullroarer

Source term: bullroarer

The Tsishaat, a Barkley Sound people who moved up the Alberni Canal in early historic times, swung the bullroarer from a handle in the Wolf Dance, and to them it was no child's toy. In the Nuu-chah-nulth Wolf Ritual the roar could stand for an earthquake: no masked dancer played the earthquake, but costumed men made its sound with bullroarers, a display that belonged to chiefs as a ceremonial privilege. The roarer kept company with song as well. In 1910 a Tsishaat singer named Tom sang for Edward Sapir's phonograph a Tsiikaa song "used in potlatch with bull-roarer"; songs of the same kind closed the Wolf ritual. Their Hupachisat neighbours upriver had taken the whole Wolf Dance, roarer included, from Nootkan tribes like this one only four or five generations back.

They were in most respects a typical central Nootkan tribe, and seem to have been much less influenced by their ex-Salish neighbors than the latter were by them.

Philip Drucker, Culture Element Distributions: XXVI, Northwest Coast (1950), p. 158.

Particulars

Object

A 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, where Nuu-chah-nulth performers used it to make the sound of an earthquake, and with Tsiikaa songs at potlatches; not a child's toy.