Round bull boats—named for the bull bison whose hides normally covered them—are watercraft used by people in the Northern Plains for short river crossings. The hair was left on the hide because it prevented the craft from spinning. The tails were kept intact and used to tie numerous bull boats together.

Gilbert Wilson was a presbyterian minister and anthropologist who studied with the Hidatsa tribe in North Dakota. He collected this boat from the people who made it, Owl Woman and Many Growths. Wilson published his research as a student at the University of Minnesota, and many of the Hidatsa objects he gathered became part of the Univeristy’s collections. In 1976, objects from the Univeristy of Minnesota’s anthropology department were transferred to The Science Museum of Minnesota.

The social meanings of objects change as they move from the communities that made them to other contexts, like museums. When I think of the life of this boat, from it’s construction and use in Fort Berthold, North Dakota, to being highlighted in numerous educational exhibitions, to being housed in The Science Museum of Minnesota’s state-of-the-art storage area, I wonder if the original makers ever imagined they would make such an important contribution to history.
-Tilly Laskey, Curator of Ethnology