NAMER-013 - museum specimen
Haida bull-roarer, Haida Gwaii (Dawson collection, 1878)
Canada - Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands), British Columbia - North America - Northwest Coast
Function not recorded
Source term: Bull-roarer
Somewhere in Haida Gwaii, in the first half of the nineteenth century, someone made a bullroarer: a painted wooden blade a little over a foot long, in three parts — blade, cord and handle — that came south in the geologist George Mercer Dawson's Haida collection and now sits, unphotographed, in a Montreal storeroom. Nobody recorded its village, its name, or what it was for, and no other Haida specimen has surfaced in a museum catalogue. What a Haida bullroarer did depended on where you asked. At Skedans it was a ceremonial voice, sounded out of sight behind the painted screen of the potlatch house; at Masset, at the archipelago's other end, it was a child's toy. This blade, provenanced only to the islands, could have been either.
- Object
- A flat wooden slat catalogued as a bull-roarer, about 38 by 7 cm, of a length-to-width proportion typical of a whirled blade. The museum records the medium as wood, bark, fibre, paint and metal, and lists the specimen in three parts (ME892.21.1-3), consistent with a blade with cord and handle. It is dated by the museum to ca. 1800-1850 and entered the collection through the 1878 Haida Gwaii expedition of George Mercer Dawson.
- Function
- Function not recorded. The museum places it among ceremonial / religious objects but documents no specific use.
- Map confidence
- medium - Representative anchor at Skidegate, the principal southern Haida village. The museum records only "Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands)" for origin; Dawson's 1878 collecting centred on the southern villages, and he attended a potlatch at Skidegate on 24 July 1878 and photographed Skidegate and Skedans, so Skidegate stands for the archipelago.
- Source location
- Object Number ME892.21.1-3