STEWART1941-001 - ethnographic attestation
Wadatika (Wada-dokado, Burns Northern Paiute)
United States - Harney Valley and Malheur Lake, southeastern Oregon - North America - Great Basin
Weather / fertility magic
wimo'to English
Source term: bull-roarer (wimo'to)
wimo'to: the Northern Paiute term Stewart prints in the survey's bull-roarer element heading; recorded for the survey as a whole, not separately attributed to the Wadatika informants.
To make the wind blow, Wadatika men whirled a wooden bullroarer — and it was no toy, said Scarface Charlie and Blind Jim, the two Wada-dokado elders Omer Stewart interviewed at Burns, who kept it apart from the spinning buzzers they described separately. A story told by Captain Louey Crook, a Wadatika narrator recorded by the frontier physician W. L. Marsden, is probably this instrument at work. Snow lay waist deep and the people were starving; a thaw-conjurer stood inside a ring of men and women, praying the south wind and the black and yellow pointed clouds into the valleys — then 'he whirled the conjuring stick and made the thaw come. It made a good noise.'
Then when he had spoken enough he whirled the conjuring stick and made the thaw come. It made a good noise.
Wadatika text of Captain Louey Crook, in Heizer (ed.), Notes on Northern Paiute Ethnography (1972), Doc. 52, p. 50.
- Object
- Wooden bullroarer; no dimensions or surviving object recorded.
- Function
- Whirled to make the wind blow; explicitly not a toy.
- Map confidence
- medium - Burns, Oregon anchor — the Wada-dokado were settled in the Indian Colony at Burns when Stewart interviewed them; the band's territory historically centered on Malheur Lake and Harney Valley. Not a performance site.
- Source location
- pp. 365, 401 (elements 1870-1874), 403 (element 1981); Heizer ed. 1972:49-50
- Weather / fertility magic