After the smudging ceremony that began the day, and before breaking into small groups to practice Dakota language skills, Neil McKay gave his campers a pep talk.
“I did not start becoming conversational till I was 25,” he told the participants of Dakota Language Camp in Bloomington on Thursday. “Anybody can become fluent. It’s just you have to work at it.”
In fact, said McKay, whose Dakota name is Cantemaza, most Dakota speakers are not first speakers — that is, raised speaking the language. When he first started learning, there were about 40 Dakota first speakers from the four Dakota communities in Minnesota. Now, there are only a handful.
The absence of first speakers comes from a long history of genocide, extermination, and boarding schools designed to sever cultural ties, McKay said. All the instructors at the camp are second language learners.
The city of Bloomington, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota Dakota Language Program, has been hosting Dakota Language Camp almost every year since 2008. For participants — a mix of about 30 kids and adults, most of whom are not Dakota — the three-day camp provides an introduction to the Dakota language and a window into the ways language can shape a worldview.
“When they’re learning Dakota here, even at a very basic level, they’re getting some philosophy through the language about how to take care of one another, how to love one another, how to help one another, because that’s what our language is about,” said McKay, a Dakota language instructor at the University of Minnesota.
In addition to teaching university students, he collaborates with immersion schools and community programs like the annual three-day camp.
The camp has been held almost every year since 2008, though there have been some exceptions, like during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dakota language camp was also canceled last year, following the death of McKay’s wife, Monica.
The camp was originally set up by Mark Morrison, who works for the Bloomington Parks and Recreation Department. Morrison said that the city was “looking for opportunities for Dakota people to tell their own story of this area and their culture, and language is one of the best ways that can happen.”
It takes place at the historic Pond-Dakota Mission Park, the 19th-century homestead of missionaries Gideon and Agnes Pond.
“It is the site of a mission, which is used to Christianize Dakota people,” McKay said. “But they also did take care of and protect a group of Dakota families after the 1862 war, when other Euro Americans wanted to either kill or ethnically cleanse Dakota people from Minnesota.”
The missionaries also produced literature and newspapers in the Dakota language which are still used as learning materials today, he said.
On Thursday morning, participants broke into three small groups at picnic tables overlooking the Minnesota River Valley. One group practiced asking each other what they were eating. Another played the board game “Guess Who,” using clothing vocabulary. Inside the Gideon and Agnes Pond House, McKay led the campers in a game of “What Eats What,” introducing animal vocabulary.
Sheyenne Tereshko, an enrolled tribal member who does not speak the language, came to the camp from Wisconsin with her kids after seeing a flyer on Facebook. She said she appreciated learning about Dakota word order and sentence structure, and being able to practice challenging sounds.
“I’m so happy that we had the opportunity to learn even a little bit,” she said. “Where we are located in Wisconsin, we could maybe look online, but it’s not the same as actually speaking with somebody who can help you sound out some of the nasal sounds or the throat sounds, and hearing it in person.”
The camp’s beautiful natural surroundings overlooking the Minnesota River Valley also play a key role in teaching Dakota language and culture. Eileen Bass, one of the camp’s instructors, said one of her favorite parts of the camp was exploring language as part of a river walk, learning different Dakota terms for trees. For example, a natural stump and a cut log have different words.
“The language is like an interpretive guide for the land, and the land’s the interpretive guide for the language, because it was created here, so people learn to see it in that way,” Bass said.
Many of the camp’s adult participants were teachers, off for the summer and eager to learn something new. Jeanne-Marie and Amelia Garay, a mother and daughter pair of teachers, signed up for the camp at the invitation of a friend who has attended in past years and came back again this year. Both said it gave them a new mindset and perspective on the natural world.
“It really does help me personally feel like I’m connecting back to the land and giving back to people that were not treated well historically, that we get to help with some of that healing and some of that learning, and help being able to carry their voices on,” Amelia said.
Jeanne-Marie said she appreciated learning to think of animals, plants, trees, and water as ancestors.
“I think most of us get into nature, and we feel something spiritual, but to have the vocabulary that it is your family is lovely,” she said.
Jared Abraham, a teacher at Bloomington’s Kennedy High School who is also trained as a Christian pastor, came to the camp with his wife and three daughters. For him, the daily smudging ceremony with drum and song was a highlight.
“It feels very divine,” he said. It felt similar to the experience of a sacred space in his own faith, he said. “A different cultural context, but a shared sacred experience.”
Daniel O’Brien, who teaches at Eagle Ridge Academy in Minnetonka, said he hoped to apply what he learned from the camp as his school implements new state social studies standards that require teachers to incorporate more Indigenous perspectives.
For McKay, his first time coordinating the camp since the death of his wife felt “really good.” She, too, had done a lot of work on Dakota language, though she was not Dakota herself. Bringing back the camp was a way to “continue the work.”
“In our way, we always look for people that are good relatives, meaning that treat everybody and everything nice,” he said. “She did that.”
