The Bullroarer Atlas

LOEB1929-033 - ethnographic attestation

Klamath

United States - Oregon - Klamath region - North America - Plateau

Weather / fertility magic

A Nahua bull-roarer of the stick-and-cord kind — a long slender cane, cord wound spirally along its shaft, a small flat wooden slip slung from...
Representative image. A Nahua bull-roarer of the stick-and-cord kind — a long slender cane, cord wound spirally along its shaft, a small flat wooden slip slung from a cord at its middle; no photograph of the Klamath sqiˑwʼ from the Oregon plateau has been located, so this Mesoamerican piece stands in for the general type. Museum of Ethnography (acc. 1900.03.0493) Image source

sqiˑwʼ Klamath (Klamath-Modoc, Oregon)

sling; bull-roarer

Etymology. Barker's Klamath Dictionary glosses sqiˑwʼ as "sling; bull-roarer" — one informant described a children's missile-throwing sling, the Pompey informants "a kind of noisemaker you whirl around your head." The word names the instrument by its whirled-noise function. (medium confidence)

The Klamath of southern Oregon enter the bullroarer record on the strength of a single clause in Edwin Loeb's 1929 survey of initiation rites. Drawing on Leslie Spier's comparative data for western North America, Loeb lists the instrument's scattered uses across the region: the Havasupai, San Carlos Apache, and Papago associated it with rain, while the Arapaho and the Klamath whirled it to produce wind. No Klamath object, maker, or rite is described beyond that one purpose. Among the Paiute and Gros Ventre, Loeb adds, the bullroarer was only a child's toy.

the Havasupai, San Carlos Apache, and Papago associate the bullroarer with rain, while the Arapaho and the Klamath have an analogous use, to produce wind.

Loeb 1929, Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies, Univ. of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn. 25(3):284
Map confidence
medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Loeb
Source location
p. 284

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