The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-194 - museum specimen

Netsilingmiut, Pelly Bay / Kugaaruk, Nunavut

Canada - Kitikmeot - Pelly Bay (Kugaaruk) - North America - Arctic

Play / practical

The Pelly Bay blade itself — serrated along both edges, its mammal-sinew cord through the terminal hole.
The Pelly Bay blade itself — serrated along both edges, its mammal-sinew cord through the terminal hole. Image source

imiklutAQ English

Source term: imiklutAQ (Rasmussen's Netsilik orthography)

imiklutAQ — Rasmussen's Netsilik term covering both the whirled bull-roarer and the two-cord buzz.

When the ethnographer Asen Balikci began his years at Pelly Bay — fieldwork that became the famous Netsilik film series — one of the things he carried out was this: a hand's-span blade of wood, saw-toothed along both edges, on a cord of mammal sinew. Rasmussen had already written its name into the record a generation earlier: imiklutAQ, listed among the games, a piece of wood cut to shape and whirled round for its humming noise — the sound of children playing on the sea ice of one of the coldest inhabited places on earth.

imiklutAQ (bull-roarer and buzz). A piece of wood cut to shape is whirled round and makes a humming noise.

Knud Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimos (Fifth Thule Expedition VIII, 1931), games list
Object
Serrated wooden bullroarer, 24.0 x 5.1 x 1.5 cm, a mammal-sinew cord through its terminal hole; collected March 1960 or earlier.
Function
A child's game in the Netsilik record: Rasmussen lists the imiklutAQ among games — a piece of wood cut to shape and whirled round to make a humming noise.
Map confidence
medium - Kugaaruk (Pelly Bay) community anchor — the museum's stated origin, not an exact findspot.
Source location
CMH artifact 177309; Rasmussen 1931 games list

View source Open this point on the interactive map