The Bullroarer Atlas

MINE2026-079 - ethnographic attestation

Fort McDowell Mohave-Apache Community (now Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation)

United States - Fort McDowell Reservation - lower Verde River, Maricopa County, Arizona - North America - Southwest

Sacred / spirit

The ual ual ii'g agual, a Yavapai medicine bull-roarer from Fort McDowell: a flat cottonwood board, cut from a lightning-struck tree, incised...
The ual ual ii'g agual, a Yavapai medicine bull-roarer from Fort McDowell: a flat cottonwood board, cut from a lightning-struck tree, incised along its length with faint zigzag lines representing lightning, strung through a hole at one end. The collector's field label, written directly on the wood, names it a "talking stick" used to cure the sick. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1911.86.95 (Freire-Marreco collection) Image source

ual ual ii'g agual English

Source term: bull-roarer

ual ual ii'g agual — Yavapai name recorded for the medicine bullroarer; smaller toys were ual ual.

Before a night of healing, a Yavapai shaman walked away from camp and whirled the bullroarer to summon the Kakaka, mountain spirits who command wind and weather — in Yavapai memory, little people who lived in the peaks before any humans, spoke Yavapai, and gave their teaching only to the medicine men. The Kakaka taught the people their masked Mountain Spirit Dance, Kakaka Iima, danced through the night to cure the sick, and the whirled roarer called them down to it. The dancers who took the spirits’ part were kept from outsiders — to speak of them was thought to bring bad luck on the teller — and in the reservation years the army banned the dances and wounded dancers to stop them. At Fort McDowell the medicine form, ual ual ii’g agual, was cut from lightning-struck cottonwood and scored with zigzag lightning lines; it belonged to “doctors” or “dreamers.” Boys made smaller ual ual as toys.

The Kakaka are just like Indians. But little, tiny Indians. They live in the mountains...(and) they talk Yavapai, but they don't talk to everybody; just to the teacher, the leader--like medicine men.

Mike Harrison and John Williams, Oral History of the Yavapai (2012)
Object
PRM 1911.86.95: a cottonwood medicine bullroarer, 265 × 45 mm, cut from a lightning-struck tree and incised with zigzag lightning lines; cotton-seed-fibre string through a hole at one end. Two small toy bullroarers, ual ual (1911.86.96–97), came in the same accession.
Function
Medicine bullroarer used by doctors or dreamers in curing and to summon the Kakaka (Gifford's Akaka); smaller forms were schoolboys’ toys.
Map confidence
high - USGS GNIS Fort McDowell populated-place coordinate; not an object findspot.
Source location
PRM 1911.86.95–97; Gifford 1932:237; Seder 1952:51–54

View source Open this point on the interactive map