The Bullroarer Atlas

NAMER-004 - ethnographic attestation

Yukon First Nations, upper Yukon borderlands

Canada - Scottie Creek-Titus upper Yukon region - North America - Subarctic

Sacred / spirit

Culin's own 1907 drawing of a Sioux bull-roarer swung from a long cord and stick — shown for the general North American form, not the six-foot...
Representative image. Culin's own 1907 drawing of a Sioux bull-roarer swung from a long cord and stick — shown for the general North American form, not the six-foot Yukon medicine rod with its attached, swastika- and moose-painted bull-roarer. Stewart Culin, Games of the North American Indians (BAE 24th Annual Report, 1907), Fig. 1008 Public domain Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

Among the ritual and shamanic objects Ukjese van Kampen treats in his 2012 Leiden dissertation on early Yukon First Nations art is a shaman's medicine rod: a long stave carrying a bull-roarer attached at its end, so that the staff itself could be swung to sound. Van Kampen, himself a Northern Tutchone artist of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, describes the bull-roarer as painted on one face with a swastika and on the other with a moose, the owner's medicine animal. The man who carried it and the precise place it came from are not set down in the account.

Object
Medicine rod described as a six-foot stave with a bull-roarer attached; the bullroarer was painted with a swastika on one side and a moose, the owner's medicine animal, on the other.
Function
Recorded as a shaman's medicine rod, grouped with ritual and shamanic objects rather than as a child's toy.
Map confidence
medium - Representative Scottie Creek / upper Yukon-Alaska borderlands anchor; the source describes a Yukon First Nations art-history context, not a precise findspot.
Source location
Chapter 6, p. 248 in the Academia.edu text view

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