S'abadeb-Seattle Art Museum The D-adze is one of the indispensable implements in a carver's tool chest, along with a straight adze, a short-handle elbow adze, several crooked knives, a chisel, a stone maul, and yew wedges. Originally adze blades were made of bone, shell, or stone, but they were quickly replaced by steel blades acquired through trade and often recycled from pioneer-style axe heads or chisels, as this one appears to be. Waterman was conducting an ethnographic survey for the University of Washington during the summer seasons of 1918 and 1919, collecting place names from southern Puget Sound consultants. Curiously, the Burton Acres Shell Midden--near where Waterman collected this D-adze--was excavated in 1996 and yielded two antler adze hafts and a bone chisel dated to approximately 500-600 years ago.

Northwest Coast bailers all work on the principle of the scoop rather than of the bucket. Water is thrown out of the canoe rather than dipped out. The bailer is made with a straight edge, which is slid up the inside of the flaring hull, catching the water and flinging it over the side. Bailers of the northern coast resemble sugar scoops; those of the Salish south are either spoon-like with pointed, diamond-shaped bowls, or scoops formed by folding and pleating of red cedar bark. This wedge-shaped style of bailer is unique to the west coast of Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula. (Holm, Spirit and Ancestor, 1987)