No. DRUCKER1950-015
Skedans Haida bullroarer
Canada · Skedans, Louise Island, Haida Gwaii · North America · Northwest Coast
Sacred / spirit
Source term: bullroarer
At a Haida potlatch a painted screen stood across the back of the house and the performers waited behind it, out of the guests' sight. The bullroarer was sounded there — a noise arriving from a source nobody could see — and it was not a child's toy. It is the only ceremonial roarer in the northern half of the coast. For seven hundred kilometres south of Haida Gwaii the instrument is a plaything, and neither of the peoples Skedans dealt with most, the Tsimshian and the Bella Bella, used it in ceremony. Whatever went on behind the screen did not come from next door.
Used behind the decorated screen at potlatches.
Philip Drucker, Culture Element Distributions: XXVI, Northwest Coast (1950), p. 268, note to element 856.
Particulars
- Object
- A slat swung on a cord fastened to a handle, sounded out of sight behind the painted screen of the potlatch house. 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