The watap could also be used as part of the joinery for the structural elements of the canoe.

The Anishinaabe peoples also extensively harvested and manufactured watap.

Examples of this packaging were called wiigwaasi-makakoon, and the watap stitchery was often used as an element in the decoration and unique identity of the package.

The word "watap" entered European languages through Canadian French, and ultimately derives from the Cree word watapiy.

The peoples initiated into the heritage of the Midewiwin, or Great Medicine Society, kept records and aids to memory through birchbark scrolls sewn together with watap.

A wiigwaasi-makak (plural: wiigwaasi-makakoon), meaning "birch-bark box" in the Anishinaabe language, is a box made of panels of birchbark sewn together with watap.

Panels of bark, sewn together with watap and caulked with tree resin, could be used to create a vessel that would resist leakage to the point of being almost waterproof.

Watap Lake, also called Watape Lake, and the adjacent Watap Portage are key elements in the Grand Portage from Lake Superior to the interior of North America.

This border is composed of the Pigeon River, and these Rove Formation lakes (going east to west): South Fowl, North Fowl, Moose, Mountain, Watap, Rose, South, Little North and Gunflint.

The word watab comes from the Anishinaabe/Ojibwe language wadab-ziibi ("river with spruce-roots") due to the exposed spruce roots once found along its banks, which comes from the Algonquian watap, the cordage used for sewing together the birch-bark panels on a canoe.

The ribs of the canoe, called verons in Canadian French, were made of white cedar, and the hull, ribs, and thwarts were fastened using watap, a binding usually made from the roots of various species of conifers, such as the white spruce, black spruce, or cedar, and caulked with pitch.