Notes
This adze, called a yú’aa, was a tool for carving and cutting timber. The materials that these adzes were made from, usually greenstone or jade, required a great deal of time to work into the desired shape. The need for these adzes was so great that the Tlingit held fasts and ceremonies in order to try to prevent the stone adzes from breaking when in use. While stone was used for hundreds of years to create these tools, iron became the preferred material once it was introduced into the area with the arrival of European colonizers.
“In those times stone axes were valuable and, when one was broken, people beat a drum as though somebody had died.”
—From the story “The Alsek River People,” told by Dekinā´k! in “Tlingit Myths and Texts,” 1909
