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DAN OLSON: A flatbed truck carrying concrete culverts the size of small cars trundles down a road from Dayton's Bluff to the sanctuary's entrance below Kellogg Boulevard. The massive conduits will carry water that flows through the area, about the size of 25 football fields. A city street linking the sanctuary to lowertown Saint Paul has been dug up and will become a bicycle trail. The trail is a long-awaited connection between a web of Saint Paul and suburban trails. Weiming Lu was president of the Lowertown Redevelopment Corporation and played a role in convincing others to join the project. Lu predicts the trail will bring a stream of visitors to the area.

WEIMING LU: We are now envisioning how this valley could connect with the bluff and with the river, with downtown, and truly create a great greenway for St Paul.

DAN OLSON: More than $10 million has been spent creating the sanctuary so far. A trickle of stream water from one of the sanctuary's caves had been restored. The area was once marshland. Streams flowed through it on their way to the Mississippi, about a half mile away. All of the streams were covered years ago by tons of fill, and officials say the cost of restoring their original flow is too great.

Neighborhood resident, Carol Carey, has worked 10 years helping organize the more than two dozen groups, including the Dakota Indians, who are restoring the area. Carey says the sanctuary's native plants, the mature cottonwood and oak trees, are a big draw.

CAROL CAREY: We can celebrate, again, the water, and we can celebrate the ecology. And we can create a more healthful environment for the migratory birds, and where we can create a space where people can learn.

DAN OLSON: The National Park Service contributed $1.3 million to help buy the sanctuary land. An early grant of $700,000 from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources started the process. Besides the arrival of white settlers, National Park Service historian, John Anfinson, says the site can be used to explain how the Dakota Indians largely lost access to the area when they were banished after the 1862 uprising.

JOHN ANFINSON: We have in this place a story of the severance of culture and the story of continuity of culture. The Dakota lost their contact to this place. The immigrants tried to create a new one.

DAN OLSON: The sanctuary's Carver Cave is named after an English explorer who visited the area. The Dakota called the cave Wakan Tipi and consider it a sacred site. Jim Rock pauses as he attempts to boil down hundreds of years of Dakota culture and religion to explain the cave's significance in a soundbite.

JIM ROCK: Wakan Tipi is a place that, for Dakota people, we consider it as our birth place.

DAN OLSON: Rock is part Dakota. He grew up in the Dayton's Bluff neighborhood above the cave. He's an educator in the Wayzata school district and comfortable trying to explain to outsiders Dakota religious beliefs and cosmology, how, in their view, the stars, plants, animals, and people are connected. The Wakan Tipi opening is barricaded with heavy steel plate to ward off intruders, but the damage has already been done. Waves of visitors over the decades have desecrated the cave's petroglyphs, carved by centuries of Native people.

Then, in the early 1860s, the front part of the cave was destroyed to make room for railroad magnate, James J. Hill's, nearby train tracks. The Dakota, Jim Rock says, have been waiting more than a hundred years to restore their connection to the area. Although memories of the cave's desecration and the banishment of the Dakota remain vivid, Rock says the reclamation may mark a new chapter.

JIM ROCK: That was kind of the beginning of the end, but maybe now we have the opportunity for a new beginning.

DAN OLSON: The Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary is open to visitors. The signs interpreting the history of the site and the bike trail will be in place by spring. Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio News.