Check "The Golden Bough", by Sir James George Frazer, for stacks of tree-related (and other) mythologies. It might interest you to know that in Germay, a way back, if one was caught stripping the bark from a tree, "the culprit's navel was to be cut out and nailed to the part of the tree which he had peeled, and he was to be driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound about its trunk." Not a lot of canoe building going on in that neighbourhood, methinks.
Online at:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/