OLSON1967-001 - ethnographic attestation
Tlingit, southeastern Alaska
United States - Southeast Alaska - North America - Northwest Coast
Play / practical
hunkaya'na English
hunkaya'na — 'north wind sound.'
On the Northwest Coast, where carved whistles did the spirits' talking, the Tlingit bull-roarer stayed in the hands of children. Hunkaya'na, they called it — the north wind's sound — and Olson, recording the word, drew the boundary in the same breath: in the Lukana dances the whistles were the voices of the spirits, and no bull-roarer was used. A spirit voice nearly everywhere else, here the whirring blade was only weather, and only play.
- Function
- A toy — and explicitly nothing more: in the Lukana society dances the whistles were the voices of the spirits, and 'there was no bull-roarer used.'
- Map confidence
- low - Broad southeast-Alaska anchor; Olson gives no locality for the toy.
- Source location
- Olson 1967, p. 121 and n. 238
- Toy / secular survival