Mushuau Innu notched bone roarer

Source term: bull-roarer

A bull-roarer carved and notched from animal bone, collected among the Mushuau Innu — the Barren Ground Naskapi, caribou hunters of interior Labrador — by the anthropologist Frank G. Speck, who sold it to the Museum of the American Indian in 1928. Across the belt of Algonquian country running west from the Naskapi and Montagnais homeland on the St. Maurice River to the Albany River, John M. Cooper found in 1928 the bull-roarer doing the same job wherever he went: whirled, together with a buzzer and a snowman built of snow, to bring the cold north wind. Neighbouring Cree at James Bay used it for exactly that, to harden a crust on the late-winter snow for easier travel by snowshoe and toboggan — the likeliest thing this Naskapi bone blade was swung for too.

To bring the north wind, the buzzer, the bull-roarer, and the snow man are resorted to.

John M. Cooper, 'Field notes on northern Algonkian magic and divination,' Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 18(8) (1928), p. 230

Particulars

Object

Bull-roarer of the Mushuau Innu (Naskapi), carved and notched from animal bone; collected by Frank G. Speck and purchased from him by the Museum of the American Indian in 1928 (NMAI 16/2468).