The Bullroarer Atlas

NAAIN-009 - museum specimen

Ihalmiut / Nueltin Lake

Canada - Nunavut - Kivalliq Region - North America - Arctic

Play / practical

Caribou Inuit (Ihalmiut) bull-roarer, Kivalliq, Nunavut — Kulturhistorisk museum, Oslo (UEM26188).
Caribou Inuit (Ihalmiut) bull-roarer, Kivalliq, Nunavut — Kulturhistorisk museum, Oslo (UEM26188). Kulturhistorisk museum, Universitetet i Oslo (UEM26188), CC BY-SA 4.0 CC BY-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: Model bull-roarer

A small bullroarer of wood and hide, about sixteen centimetres long, collected among the Ihalmiut of the Nueltin Lake barrens around 1948 and now in the Royal Ontario Museum. It belongs to the Farley Mowat Collection: Mowat, who would later write People of the Deer about these inland Caribou Inuit, was in the same country as a wildlife field technician studying barren-ground caribou when he gathered it, along with a companion piece from June of that year that he labelled a "Toy Ihalmute Memeo or Bull-roarer." Both are catalogued by the museum as model bullroarers; no ritual use is noted for either.

Collector termed this as a "Toy Ihalmute Memeo or Bull-roarer."

Royal Ontario Museum, object 2018.21.5 (Farley Mowat Collection), catalogue description
Object
Model bullroarer of wood and hide in Farley Mowat Collection
Function
Model or toy evidence from Ihalmiut/Nueltin Lake area
Map confidence
low_medium - Nueltin Lake regional anchor from source locality; not ROM Toronto
Source location
ROM object 2018.21.4; title/model record fields verified 2026-06-01

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