MUS2026-011 - museum specimen
Makah
United States - Cape Flattery, Washington - North America - Northwest Coast
Restricted
Source term: bull-roarer
A Makah bull-roarer from the Cape Flattery country near Neah Bay, Washington, now held at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and figured by Frances Densmore in her Nootka and Quileute Music (1939). Far from a stray household object, Densmore names the bull-roarer among the instruments of the Klokali, the Makah Wolf Ritual and the greatest ceremony of their year. Men hid in the woods with whistles "imitating wolves" and gathered up those "to be initiated"; the meeting was of "a very serious character" and "something terrifying," children kept indoors while the howling and the concealed reed whistles gave voice to the wolves and the thunderbird. "The instruments used at Klokali included four or five bull-roarers," Densmore records, and the surviving blade on Plate 11 is one of them.
a, Whalebone war club; b, Whalebone knife; c, Carved toy; d, Bull-roarer; e, Stick placed in ground to denote owner's absence from home; f, Canoe baler (model).
Densmore, Nootka and Quileute Music (BAE Bulletin 124, 1939), Plate 11 caption
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Makah, in the collection of Smithsonian NMNH (NMNH Anthropology).
- Function
- Instrument of the Makah Klokali (Wolf Ritual), an initiation society whose members impersonated wolves; the bull-roarer was one of the Klokali sound-instruments alongside the concealed reed whistles that voiced the wolves and thunderbird.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
- NMNH Anthropology
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite