RIDINGTON1976-001 - ethnographic attestation
Dunne-za (Beaver, Northern Athapaskan)
Canada - Peace and Prophet River drainages, northeastern British Columbia - North America - Subarctic
Sacred / spirit
Source term: bullroarer
Giant Spider Man stood on a mountain top and swung something around his head on a line, and what it sounded like was a spider's thread pulled taut. People who climbed up to find where the noise was coming from he killed, and drank the fluid out of their bodies. Robin Ridington recorded the story among the Dunne-za of the Peace River country, and with it the rule that follows from it: a man whose power comes from giant spider must never hear a stretched string or a stretched hide, or the being inside him wakes and he turns wechuge, a cannibal and no longer a person. So the whirring survives here not as an instrument in anyone's hands but as a sound that a certain kind of man cannot be allowed to hear.
- Object
- No specimen: the instrument appears in narrative as something swung on a line around the head, its sound likened to that of a stretched spider thread. No Dunne-za term for it is recorded in the source.
- Function
- In narrative, swung by the cannibal giant Spider Man on a mountain top to draw people up within reach, whereupon he killed them and drank their body fluids. Among living people the corollary is a prohibition: anyone whose power comes from giant spider must not hear the sound of a stretched string or a stretched hide, or he becomes wechuge.
- Map confidence
- medium - Prophet River, northeastern British Columbia -- a Dunne-za community in Ridington's fieldwork area. Dunne-za territory runs across the Peace and upper Fort Nelson drainages; the story is not localised to a site and this is a people anchor, not a performance place.
- Source location
Page references
Anthropologica 18(2):115-116; Little Bit Know Something pp. 167-170
- Spirit voice