NAMER-014 - museum specimen
Ingalik (Deg Hit'an), lower Yukon / Innoko River, interior Alaska
United States (Alaska) - Deg Hit'an (Ingalik) territory, lower Yukon and Innoko rivers, Anvik-Shageluk-Holy Cross region, interior Alaska - North America - Subarctic (Alaska)
Play / practical
Source term: bull roarer
Among the Deg Hit'an (Ingalik) of the lower Yukon, the bull roarer was a boys' toy. Cornelius Osgood, working out of Anvik in the mid-1930s, described it as a narrow strip of spruce about a foot long with serrated edges, pierced at one end so a six-foot rawhide line could be tied through it; a boy would whip it around his head to raise a loud burr. One such roarer, made at Anvik by Billy Williams, survives in the Yale Peabody Museum, its catalog note plain: made of spruce with a rawhide line, "used only as a toy by small boys." No ceremony, no spirit voice, no secrecy from women is recorded here — in this corner of subarctic Alaska the roaring slat was simply a thing boys made noise with.
Made of spruce wood with a rawhide line attached at one end. Used only as a toy by small boys. Made by Billy Williams at Anvik, Alaska.
Yale Peabody Museum, Division of Anthropology, catalog record YPM ANT 050129, "Bull Roarer" (Deg Hit'an, Northern Athapaskan).
- Object
- A narrow strip of spruce about a foot long with serrated edges, pierced at one end where a roughly six-foot babiche (rawhide) line is fastened, whipped around the head to produce a loud burr.
- Function
- A boys' noisemaking toy: a serrated spruce slat whirled on a long rawhide cord to roar; recorded as used only as a toy by small boys.
- Map confidence
- high - approximate territory centroid (anchored on Anvik, on the lower Yukon, the principal Deg Hit'an village and Osgood's fieldwork base; Anvik 62.656 N, 160.207 W)
- Source location
- YPM ANT 050129 (museum catalog record); Osgood 1940 text (page not independently re-verified, commonly cited ca. pp. 257-258)
- Toy / secular survival