JSTEWARD1943-002 - ethnographic attestation
Northern Paiute-speaking Bannock, Fort Hall
United States - Fort Hall, Snake River plain, southeastern Idaho - North America - Great Basin
Weather / fertility magic
wupu'nonoyuwin: English
Source term: bull-roarer (wupu'nonoyuwin:)
The Bannock wintered with the Shoshoni at Fort Hall, travelled with them and married them, and kept their own language through all of it. For all the differences that closeness left standing between the two peoples, the bullroarer was not one of them. Both swung a wooden blade on a wooden handle, both for children and for warm wind, and both named it with the same construction — a booming root under a prefix meaning 'by means of a long swung thing'. What the Bannock kept that their neighbours did not was the far side of the weather rule, and it attached to a second whirring instrument, the buzzer: where a summer-born person swinging the roarer calls the warm wind, a winter-born person whirring the buzzer in winter brings the storms.
Whirring buzzer by winter-born person in winter brings storms.
Steward 1943, p. 384.
- Object
- Wooden whirrer fitted with a wooden handle.
- Function
- Swung as a children's toy and swung to bring warm wind.
- Map confidence
- medium_high - Fort Hall, Idaho, where Steward places the band. The Bannock and the Bohogue Shoshoni (JSTEWARD1943-001) were co-resident there. Territory anchor for the named people; not a use site.
- Source location
- Steward 1943, pp. 264, 333, 383, 384
- Weather magic
- Toy / secular survival