The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-015 - museum specimen

Mushuau Innu (Naskapi) bull-roarer (museum specimen)

Canada - Labrador - North America - Subarctic

Weather / fertility magic

Mushuau Innu antler bullroarer from Labrador, serrated along both edges.
Mushuau Innu antler bullroarer from Labrador, serrated along both edges. Image source

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. The museum records only the object, the maker's people, and the place; no rite is named for this specimen, and the two great inventories of Naskapi play, Lucien Turner's tally of their amusements in the 1880s and Stewart Culin's 1907 survey, both pass the bull-roarer over. But the same year Speck's specimen entered the museum, John M. Cooper was surveying the belt of Algonquian country running west from the Naskapi and Montagnais homeland on the St. Maurice River to the Albany River, and found 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, even where no one wrote it down.

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
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).
Function
Culture-belt evidence, not object-specific: John M. Cooper's 1927 Algonquian reconnaissance, covering the Tête de Boule/Montagnais-Naskapi through Cree/northern-Ojibwa belt from the St. Maurice River to the Albany River, names the bull-roarer among the devices used 'to bring the north wind' (Cooper 1928). No rite or name is recorded for this specific specimen.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
Page references

National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI)

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