STEWART1941-002 - ethnographic attestation
Atsa (Atsa'kudokwa-tuviwarai, 'red-butte dwellers') Northern Paiute, Fort McDermitt
United States - Quinn River drainage, northern Nevada - North America - Great Basin
Weather / fertility magic
Wimo'to English
Source term: wimo'to
Wimo'to: the Northern Paiute name for the bullroarer, cognate with the Surprise Valley kwi'mo and with the wimo- forms in Stewart's Ute and Southern Paiute vocabularies.
Pete Snap, born at McDermitt on the Quinn River, told Omer Stewart what the wimo'to was for, and the answer was narrow: only to melt snow. The whirrer was juniper, and it had to be painted red. Stewart's table backs the notice up in the negative - the Atsa marked the toy column empty and the wind column full, and they kept the instrument apart from the buzzers they also spun. Two details in one line make this band's roarer unlike its neighbours': a required colour and a single seasonal job, working against the winter rather than for a crowd.
Bull-roarer used only to melt snow. Whirrer of juniper had to be painted red.
Stewart, Culture Element Distributions: XIV, Northern Paiute (1941), p. 438, note to element 1870
- Object
- Wooden whirrer of juniper, painted red. Stewart's Atsa column marks the whirrer as wood and denies the sheep-horn variant; no dimensions and no surviving object are recorded. The lexeme is described elsewhere in Northern Paiute as a flattened board about six inches long and two to three wide, serrated on both edges, the string tied at one end and twirled over the head.
- Function
- Whirled to melt snow and to make the wind blow; explicitly not a toy.
- Map confidence
- high - McDermitt, on the Nevada-Oregon line, anchors the Atsa band's Quinn River territory and the reservation Stewart names; not a specific use site.
- Source location
- Stewart 1941, pp. 364, 401, 403, 438
- Weather magic