A reasonable and necessary intermediate step would be the smelting of copper. That would allow the use of small bits of copper to be melted and cast into larger implements.
It never happened in the Great Lake area, or, if it did, we have not found any traces of it.
One of the reasons may be they never mastered pottery making. Pottery "firing" offers a way to get to copper smelting.
The Aztecs had cast copper axes.
This article says they did.
https://www.npca.org/articles/2309-exploring-70-centuries-of-mining-history