Kamia roarer in toloache country

Source term: bull-roarer

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian holds a bull-roarer of the Kamia, the desert division of the Kumeyaay who raised maize, beans, and teparies on the floodplains of California's Imperial Valley, and withholds its image as a culturally sensitive object. Among the Kumeyaay the ceremonial sound-makers were gourd and turtle-shell rattles and reed flutes, and the boys' initiation centered on the toloache rite, in which they drank a datura infusion, fasted, and danced until the drug brought on a vision meant to guide them for life. A Kamia man of the KwoL clan, questioned in the mid-1930s, remembered the bullroarer among his people as a toy rather than a ceremonial call.

Particulars

Object

Bull-roarer of the Kamia (Kumeyaay), in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).

Function

Museum-withheld as culturally sensitive; no use recorded for this specimen. Mid-1930s Kamia (KwoL) testimony reported the bullroarer as a toy.