LOEB1929-033 - ethnographic attestation
Klamath wind bullroarer
United States - Oregon - Klamath region - North America - Plateau
Play / practical
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 bullroarer was a plain thing — a paddle of unornamented wood about fourteen inches long, notched at the narrow end for its cord — and Leslie Spier's informants dismissed it as a boy's plaything that "has no significance." The whirred sound that carried real power belonged to a different instrument: a buzzer of deer astragalus spun on a sinew cord, its drone shaped into the words poke'wot poke'wot, "drive the deer out." It was a hunting charm, echoing the drives near Pelican Bay where deer were forced into the water and women waited in canoes to kill them. The idea that the Klamath whirled a bullroarer to make wind traces not to Spier's fieldwork but to Edwin Loeb's 1929 comparison of western rites.
The bullroarer is a boy's plaything; it has no significance.
Leslie Spier, Klamath Ethnography (UCPAAE 30, 1930), p. 83
- Function
- Spier's Klamath fieldwork records the bullroarer as a boy's plaything without significance — a plain notched paddle; the whirred deer-charm power belonged to a separate astragalus buzzer.
- Map confidence
- medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Loeb
- Source location
- p. 284
- Toy / secular survival