MUS2026-006 - museum specimen
Jemez (Walatowa) bull-roarer (museum specimen)
United States - Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico - North America - Southwest
Function not recorded
Source term: bull-roarer
Whirled on its cord, a bull-roarer makes a low, carrying moan - and at Walatowa, most tight-lipped of the New Mexico pueblos, such sacred things are not for outsiders to witness. It is still unlawful here to photograph, record, or even sketch a ceremony, and the National Museum of the American Indian keeps this one in that same silence: classed as sacred, shown as words with no picture. The man who carried it off kept the silence too. Albert Reagan, a government schoolteacher, took it around 1901 and sold it to the museum in 1919, then published a study of Jemez dancing that never once mentions a bull-roarer. When Elsie Clews Parsons gathered tales at Jemez in 1925, one narrator left his deliberately unfinished, so no outsider would ever hold the whole.
- Object
- Carved wood and hide bull-roarer of the Jemez (Walatowa), NMAI catalog no. 9/4632, collected by the Indian Service teacher Albert B. Reagan probably in 1901-02 and sold by him to the Museum of the American Indian in 1919. The museum withholds the image as culturally sensitive.
- Function
- Restricted sacred instrument — the holding museum withholds or flags it as culturally sensitive (a secret/sacred object, not a toy).
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
Page references
National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), catalog no. 9/4632 (EDAN record NMAI_102221)