The Bullroarer Atlas

No. KEDDIE2023-002

Nimkish roarer with unequal blades

Canada · British Columbia · northern Vancouver Island · Nimpkish River and Cormorant Island ('Namgis country) · North America · Northwest Coast

Function not recorded

Matthews’s engraving of a Navajo whizzer
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Matthews’s engraving of a Navajo whizzer Public domain · Image source

Source term: two bladed bull roarer

One blade is half the size of the other. This two-bladed roarer, collected in 1900, comes from the Nimkish, the 'Namgis people of the Nimpkish River on northern Vancouver Island, whose village now stands at Alert Bay. Among the Kwakwaka'wakw, the whirring stick belonged to the winter ceremony: at midnight men climbed secretly onto the house roofs and whirled it as the voice of the spirit come to carry off another novice.

a two bladed bull roarer (16/8125) with one blade half the size of the other

Grant Keddie, 'Bullroarers in the Indigenous Collections of the Royal B.C. Museum' (2023)

Particulars

Object
Two-bladed bullroarer, one blade half the size of the other; American Museum of Natural History 16/8125, collected by Franz Boas in 1900.
Function
Not recorded.

Sources

  1. Grant Keddie, 'Bullroarers in the Indigenous Collections of the Royal B.C. Museum' (2023), Ethnographic Collections View · archived
  2. American Museum of Natural History, Division of Anthropology, 16/8125

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.