LOEB1929-028 - ethnographic attestation
Arapaho toy or wind bullroarer
United States - Great Plains - Arapaho - North America
Play / practical
hateikuuca Arapaho (Algonquian; Plains)
Source term: "hateikuuca"
Among the Arapaho the bullroarer was a boy's toy: a flat piece of bone about two by four inches, strung on a short cord and swung from a wooden handle. Whirled fast it was said to roar like distant thunder, the bellowing of a bull, or howling, and it was held to produce wind because it sounded like wind. It also entered the Ghost Dance, where it was sometimes used to start the singing. Among the closely related Gros Ventre, Kroeber found the bull-roarer and the buzzer to be only children's toys, both called nakaantan, "making cold" — the same word the Gros Ventre gave to the thermometer — which he traced to the widespread idea that the bull-roarer breeds wind. Loeb cites the Arapaho as the northern edge of the Plains bullroarer; drawing on Spier's western survey he records it making wind among the Arapaho but serving only as a toy among the Gros Ventre and Paiute.
They were both called nakaantan ("making cold," a name given also to the thermometer), probably from the widespread Indian idea that the bull-roarer breeds wind.
Kroeber 1908, Ethnology of the Gros Ventre (Anthropological Papers AMNH 1)
- Function
- A toy that was also thought to produce wind - and, in Kroeber's specimen, a bone blade rather than a wooden one: about an inch wide, four or five inches long, neither end pointed, deeply notched down both sides.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Loeb
- Source location
- pp. 271, 284
- Weather magic
- Toy / secular survival