DRUCKER1950-004 - ethnographic attestation
Koskimo bullroarer
Canada - Quatsino Sound, northern Vancouver Island - North America - Northwest Coast
Sacred / spirit
Source term: bullroarer
About midnight, men climbed quietly onto the roofs of the Koskimo houses and whirled the whirring sticks. The noise was the voice of Hai'aLilaqas, or of Wīnā'lag·ilîs, come to take away another novice; it sounded four times over, ten minutes at a stretch, and afterwards the people sang their secret songs indoors. Each dancing society had its own sound: the whirring stick served the hamatsa, the mamaqa, the haialikala, the toXuit and the hawinalaL, while the lolo'LalaL alone were given kelp trumpets. One Koskimo stick, collected in the 1880s and now in Berlin, is a lanceolate blade twenty-three and a half inches long.
KK: Used in the nulam dances.
Philip Drucker, Culture Element Distributions: XXVI, Northwest Coast (1950), p. 268, note to element 856.
- Object
- A lanceolate wooden blade pierced at the top and swung on a cord from a handle. A Koskimo whirring stick collected by Adrian Jacobsen (Berlin, IV A 1488) is 23½ inches — 59.7 cm — long.
- Function
- Whirled from the housetops at midnight in the winter dances; the sound was the voice of a spirit coming to take a novice.
- 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; Supplemented from Franz Boas, The Social Organization and the Secret…
- Source location
Page references
printed p. 199, elements 854-857; notes printed p. 268; Boas 1897 pp. 610-611, fig. 189
- Source confidence
- high Quatsino Sound, northern Vancouver Island -- territory anchor, not a findspot.
Discussed in: The Bullroarer–Swallowing/Initiation Complex
- Spirit voice