FOWLER1979-001 - museum specimen
Kaibab Southern Paiute-attributed bullroarer whirrers
United States - Arizona Strip - Kaibab Indian Reservation, northern Arizona - North America - Great Basin
Weather / fertility magic
naiyaratinömpö English
Source term: bullroarer
bullroarer: English Smithsonian source term; naiyaratinömpö: the Kaibab band term Stewart recorded (1942, p. 352) — it names the instrument generally, not this Powell specimen.
Powell's collection preserves a strange compound roarer: a long sumac staff, sinew cord and buckskin thong carrying two small notched wooden whirrers — an elaborate three-part rig gathered while the one-armed major was mapping the canyon country of the Colorado. What the Kaibab used the bull-roarer for was set down some sixty years on, when Mose, a blind Kaibab elder at Moccasin, Arizona, described the naiyaratinömpö to Omer Stewart: a wooden blade on a handled string, a boy's toy — and a means of making the wind blow. Powell's catalogue credits the rig to the Kaibab, whose name he himself carried onto the map: Southern Paiute for 'mountain lying down.'
There is a single bullroarer (Fig. 62a) in the collection.
Fowler and Matley, *Material Culture of the Numa* (1979), p. 72, fig. 62a.
- Object
- A 67.5 cm Rhus trilobata stick, 76 cm four-ply sinew cord, and 69 cm buckskin thong carry two three-notched wooden whirrers (9 x 4 cm and 7 x 3 cm).
- Function
- This specimen's use is unrecorded; among the Kaibab the bull-roarer was a toy and was whirled to make the wind blow.
- Map confidence
- low - Representative Kaibab Indian Reservation anchor on Arizona's northern border. The source gives a collection attribution, not an object findspot.
- Source location
Page references
p. 72, fig. 62a; table 2; Stewart 1942 printed p. 291 (els. 2792, 2795, 2797, 2799), p. 352 vocabulary
- Weather magic
- Toy / secular survival