Each June, a three-day language camp is held at Pond-Dakota Mission Park, the bluff-top site overlooking the Minnesota River Valley. This year's camp drew around 30 participants, mostly non-Dakota, including some enrolled tribal members and teachers, according to the Star Tribune.
The camp has run almost every summer since 2008, with breaks during the COVID-19 pandemic and last year, when coordinator Neil McKay's wife died, according to Sahan Journal. McKay, who goes by the Dakota name Cantemaza and teaches Dakota language at the University of Minnesota, leads the camp alongside instructor Eileen Bass. Bloomington Parks and Recreation staffer Mark Morrison originally helped found the program.
Days mix small-group practice at picnic tables with games built around vocabulary — a version of "Guess Who" using clothing terms, and a matching game called "What Eats What" for animal words. Instructors also lead river walks where campers learn the Dakota names for different trees along the bluff, using the landscape itself as the lesson plan. "The language is like an interpretive guide for the land," Bass said, per Sahan Journal.
McKay has been candid that fluency doesn't come fast or easy — he didn't become conversational in Dakota until he was 25, and the camp's instructors are themselves second-language learners rather than first speakers. One participant, Sheyenne Tereshko, said she was grateful just for the chance to pick up a little bit of the language, according to Sahan Journal.
The setting carries its own history. Pond-Dakota Mission Park sits on the site of the 1856 Gideon and Agnes Pond House, built by missionary brothers who arrived in Minnesota in 1834 to work with Chief Cloud Man's Dakota band. The Ponds developed a written alphabet for the Dakota language. The 18-acre park, at 401 East 104th Street, includes the historic brick house — now a museum on the National Register of Historic Places — along with an Indigenous plant arboretum added in 2024. The site is open to the public Saturdays from 1 to 4 p.m.
The camp is open to kids and adults alike, making it one of the few places in the metro where the language, and the bluff-top landscape it was built to describe, can be learned together.