No. DRUCKER1950-007
Bella Coola kusiut bullroarer
Canada · Bella Coola valley, central British Columbia coast · North America · Northwest Coast
Sacred / spirit
Source term: bullroarer
Salishan speakers set down among Wakashan neighbours, the Nuxalk of the Bella Coola valley faced inland along the grease trails as much as out to sea. Their winters turned on the kusiut, the masked ceremonial society whose dances were inherited property, entered by initiation and danced as the doings of supernatural beings; by the 1920s every Nuxalk, even babes in arms, counted as a kusiut. The bullroarer was part of the society's paraphernalia. Children, meanwhile, swung a handled one in play, a double life recorded for no other people on this coast.
Particulars
- Object
- A wooden slat swung on a cord fastened to a handle, the standard form all along this coast. Neither dimensions nor material recorded.
Source
Philip Drucker, 'Culture Element Distributions: XXVI, Northwest Coast,' University of California Anthropological Records 9:3 (Berkeley, 1950), p. 199, elements 854-857, with notes p. 268; Brian Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity (Cambridge University Press, 2018), ch. 2, p. 61, citing T. F. McIlwraith, The Bella Coola Indians (1948), vol. II, pp. 28, 250