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From a park picnic table a woman named Ruby watches her 12-year-old granddaughter, Shayla, answer a reporter's questions. They are mostly one-word answers. Are you having fun learning the Dakota language? "Yes." Is it hard? "No." What's the hardest part? "Sentences."
Shayla is as tiny as her answers are short. She's at the Birch Coulee County Park just outside of Morton to celebrate the end of a summer camp for Dakota youth learning the language. Look in any direction and there are clusters of kids playing language games.
Her parents don't speak the language. Ruby, her grandmother, doesn't speak it either. "My grandparents raised me," she says, "and Dakota is all they ever spoke. But then they took it away from us in the schools and we lost it. I'm proud of Shayla. Very proud."
Of the roughly 4,000 Dakota people living in Minnesota, there are just eight who are known to be fluent in the Dakota language. Many, like Ruby, were deprived of the language in...