DRUCKER1950-013 - ethnographic attestation
Gitksan bullroarer
Canada - Kispiox, upper Skeena River, British Columbia - North America - Northwest Coast
Play / practical
Source term: bullroarer
Kispiox lies far up the Skeena, a long way from salt water, and Gitxsan life was the best preserved of any Tsimshian-speaking people on the northern rivers. The bullroarer reached that far inland in precisely its coastal form — a slat on a cord fastened to a handle — and arrived as a child's toy, with no ceremonial use. Elsewhere on this coast an answer like that can be put down to what missionaries and epidemics had taken away. Here nothing much had been taken.
- 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
- A child's toy; no ceremonial use recorded.
- 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 Kispiox on the upper Skeena, British Columbia -- territory anchor, not a findspot.
- Toy / secular survival