For most of Ula'ula Island's history, Tapu Bulu was understood as a guardian not of its people, but of its pokemon; a god who protected nature and the wilderness from human encroachment. People prayed to Tapu Bulu to ask forgiveness for the trees they cut or pokemon they hunted, and its temples were built in the hopes of keeping its wrath at bay. These prayers, unfortunately, were not always successful; the residents of the ruined Tapu Village, like of all settlements on newly cleared Ula'ulan lands, were especially observant and wary of provoking the god's wrath. Documents from the village's short history often read as prophetic and eerie with the benefit of hindsight.
Perceptions of Tapu Bulu changed, and perhaps the god itself mellowed out, with the introduction of Tauros and Miltank to Alola. The mortal cattle pokemon are too large to fit on a boat without the aid of a pokeball, and Alola's initial settlers had not yet discovered such a device, but the advent of global trade saw Alolan farmers eagerly import them for food, milk, and transportation. Although the region's most famous Tauros ranch is on Akala Island, farmers from Ula'ula were no less eager to raise them.
Perhaps the sight of pokemon resembling itself charging across new farms changed Tapu Bulu's mind about human expansion, or perhaps humans had simply taken all they wanted from the wilderness and it had nothing left to defend. Regardless, Tapu Bulu is today understood as a god of agriculture, its bovine appearance now resembling a farm pokemon, its ability to make plants grow interpreted not in the context of trees, but of crops. Between this reinterpretation and influence from neighboring islands with their own guardian deities, Tapu Bulu is finally viewed as protecting all of Ula'ula, human and pokemon alike.