The camp meets at Pond-Dakota Mission Park, the historic homestead of Gideon and Agnes Pond overlooking the Minnesota River Valley in Bloomington, and it's been running almost every year since 2008. It was paused during the COVID-19 pandemic and again in 2025 after the death of Monica McKay, wife of the camp's longtime coordinator — this year marks Neil McKay's first time back running it since her passing.
McKay, who goes by the Dakota name Cantemaza, teaches Dakota language at the University of Minnesota and coordinates the camp through a partnership between the university's Dakota Language Program and the city's parks and recreation department. The camp was originally started by Mark Morrison of Bloomington Parks and Recreation. About 30 people show up each year, a mix of kids and adults, and most of them aren't Dakota — many of the adults are teachers looking to bring what they learn back into their own classrooms.
Each day opens with a smudging ceremony, drum, and song, then breaks into small groups at picnic tables for language practice — vocabulary games covering food, clothing, and animals — and walks through the park where instructors point out Dakota terms for the trees and landscape around them. All of the instructors are themselves second-language learners, which McKay treats as proof of concept rather than a limitation. "I did not start becoming conversational till I was 25," he said. "Anybody can become fluent."
The stakes behind that message are real: by the university's own count, Minnesota has only about five first-language Dakota speakers born and raised in the state, plus roughly 20 more living elsewhere. That scarcity is part of why the university created the country's first Dakota language major in 2023, aimed at training the next generation of immersion teachers.
At the camp, that shortage translates into a hands-on philosophy: language and land are taught as inseparable, with the river valley itself serving as a kind of textbook. Organizers describe the goal less as vocabulary drilling than as a way of understanding how to relate to the land and to each other — a worldview carried inside the grammar itself.