The Bullroarer Atlas

STEWART1942-005 - primary ethnography

Taviwatsiu Ute rawhide bullroarer

United States - Front Range near Denver, Colorado (band removed to the Uintah Reservation, 1880) - North America - Great Basin

Sacred / spirit

Northern Ute bullroarer with its buckskin line.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Northern Ute bullroarer with its buckskin line. · CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Image source

nia'monöpö English

Source term: Bull-roarer: of rawhide

nia'monöpö: the Taviwatsiu term for the bull-roarer in Stewart's comparative vocabulary (shared with the Timpanogots); no literal gloss is given. | 2026-07-26: Smith 1974 p. 279 gives a second White River name for the bull-roarer, /neta=t+ mutunu=p+/, elicited thirty-two years after Stewart's nia'monoepoe and by a different fieldworker. The two are not obviously cognate; both stand, neither corrects the other.

Denver was theirs once: Stewart's White River Ute informants, interviewed on the Uintah Reservation, still named it as the former center of Taviwatsiu country. Their bull-roarer blade was rawhide, not wood, whirled on a handled string — a child's toy, but in summer-born hands a tool to raise wind and clear clouds, and an item of a shaman's kit. Jane Tonem-Pickett, who gave most of the record, had been living at Grand Junction when the Meeker fight of 1879 broke over the band; within a year her people were removed across the mountains to Utah.

Used effectively only by people born in summer.

Stewart 1942:291, element 2802
Object
Whirrer of rawhide swung on a string with a wooden handle; a wooden blade was denied.
Function
A toy; also whirled to make wind blow and clear away clouds, effective only for people born in summer, and kept among a shaman's paraphernalia.
Map confidence
medium - Representative anchor at Denver, which Stewart's informants remembered as the former center of the Taviwatsiu area (Lowie: 'those formerly west of Denver'); the band removed to the Uintah Reservation in 1880, where Stewart interviewed them.
Source location
Page references

printed p. 291 (els. 2794, 2795, 2797, 2799, 2800, 2802 +; 2792 wood -); p. 315 (el. 4087 +); vocabulary p. 352; band p. 237; informants p. 238

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