The Bullroarer Atlas

No. DRUCKER1950-004

Koskimo bullroarer

Canada · Quatsino Sound, northern Vancouver Island · North America · Northwest Coast

Sacred / spirit

Berlin IV A 1488, the whirring stick Boas published as Koskimo: a broad tapering wooden blade and separate slim handle connected by a short cord at their ends.
Plate I. Berlin IV A 1488, the whirring stick Boas published as Koskimo, whole on its cord and handle. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 · Image source
Boas’s 1897 drawing of the Koskimo whirring stick, Berlin IV A 1488: a long flat board linked by cord to a separate handle.
Plate II. Boas’s 1897 drawing of the Koskimo whirring stick, Berlin IV A 1488. Public domain · Image source

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, ten minutes at a stretch. The stick Franz Boas drew for that night survives in Berlin, still on its cord and wooden handle. The Koskimo sounded it again in the nulam, a Wolf dance that could be held in any season. Drum and whirring announced the supernatural beings; the novices vanished into the house of the Wolves and came back on the fourth morning, singing, dressed in branches. Among the privileges they then displayed was the sisiutl, the Feathered Serpent, carried as a figure and as a spear hung with a hundred small heads.

Used in the nulam dances.

Philip Drucker, Culture Element Distributions: XXVI, Northwest Coast (1950), p. 268, note to element 856.

Particulars

Object
A lanceolate wooden blade pierced at the top and swung on a cord from a handle; 23½ in. (59.7 cm). Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, IV A 1488 (coll. J. A. Jacobsen), catalogued by the museum as Hesquiaht.
Function
Whirled from the housetops at midnight in the winter dances; the sound was the voice of a spirit coming to take a novice.

Sources

  1. Philip Drucker, “Culture Element Distributions: XXVI, Northwest Coast,” University of California Anthropological Records 9:3 (1950), p. 199, elements 854–857, notes p. 268 View · archived
  2. Franz Boas, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, Report of the U.S. National Museum for 1895 (1897), pp. 610–611, fig. 189
  3. Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, IV A 1488 View
  4. Philip Drucker, Kwakiutl Dancing Societies, Anthropological Records 2(6) (1940), pp. 201, 219–220 View · archived

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.