JENNESS1922-001 - ethnographic attestation
Copper Inuit (Inuinnait), Coronation Gulf
Canada - Coronation Gulf - Northwest Territories - North America - Arctic
Play / practical
imilguptak English
imilguptak — the Copper Inuit bull-roarer; nilitak, the buzz, is a separate children's toy Jenness knew only from description.
Among the Copper Inuit of Coronation Gulf the bull-roarer was a child's thing, and its name was its own: imilguptak, kept carefully apart in Diamond Jenness's account from the nilitak, the buzz. The anthropologist did more than write the word down — the serrated bone blade he collected, still on its sinew cord, sits in the Canadian Museum of History, so the sentence and the object it describes survive together.
Two other toys, the bull-roarer, imilguptak, and the buzz, nilitak, are also confined to children.
Jenness, The Life of the Copper Eskimos (1922), p. 220
- Object
- Serrated animal-bone blade on a single mammal-sinew cord, 22.0 x 5.0 x 0.5 cm — CMH IV-D-462, collected by Diamond Jenness, 1916 or earlier.
- Function
- Children's toy: Jenness records the bull-roarer, imilguptak, as confined to children, explicitly separate from the nilitak buzz.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - Bernard Harbour / Coronation Gulf anchor — the Canadian Arctic Expedition Southern Party's base among the Copper Inuit; the CMH record gives no findspot below 'Northwest Territories'.
- Source location
- Jenness 1922, p. 220; CMH IV-D-462
- Toy / secular survival