This extraordinary piece sets benchmarks for surface, color and patination. An oversized feast ladle, it has been hewn from a magnificent ash burl with a large, well balanced bowl and a handle which terminates at an angled disc carved with a demilune center.

A demilune is a crescent or half-moon shape, and its use in this piece is interpreted as the eye of a Manitou. Manitou are the spirit beings of Algonquian groups of Native Americans. This spirit is seen as a contactable person as well as a concept. Everything has its own manitou—every plant, every stone, even objects like this ladle.

The Manitou motif is repeated throughout Northeastern and Western Algonquian cultures, either singularly, in pairs, or part of a larger abstraction, and has been convincingly shown to be diagnostic of a Manitou.

However, in later years, after about 1700, the motif appears to have become more a decorative device rather than totemic.