“I’m here until January,” said a man sitting with his arms crossed in the backseat. The six of us had piled into an old Ford Taurus, hitching a ride back to camp from a prayer ceremony at the site in North Dakota where protests against the now infamous pipeline project had been met with riot police and attack dogs only days before. “The long haul.”

“Right on,” said a woman in the front. “That’s dedication.”

He was from the Navajo Nation, where he was studying business management at Diné College on the reservation. She was from the Cherokee Nation and had arrived at 3am that morning. Everyone in the car, it turned out, was from a different tribe. That’s not unusual for Red Warrior Camp near Cannonball, North Dakota, where nations and tribes from around the world have united behind a common purpose: stop the Dakota Access pipeline.

The campsites, Sacred Stone and Red Warrior, have swelled to well over 2,000 people. A seedling camp has sprung up on the road close to where construction on the pipeline is taking place about an hour south of Bismarck. Together, they constitute a sustainable community, complete with kitchens, donation centers, schools and legal counseling. The scope of the gathering is unprecedented, with over 280 tribes represented at the camps.

This combining of forces has been spurred on by the urgent nature of the crisis. For indigenous people, climate change and pollution aren’t the battles of tomorrow. They are very real, very present issues that have already dramatically impacted everyday life. The Inuit residents of Shishmaref, Alaska, are voting to relocate their village due to rising sea levels. The Navajo Nation is suing the EPA over a toxic mine spill that contaminated the San Juan River, which the Navajo depend on to water their crops and livestock. Last March, the Lenka people in Honduras lost civil rights leader and environmentalist Berta Cáceres, an ardent opponent of the privatization of the river Río Gualcarqueque, to assassination.

Historically, oil transportation has been bad news for indigenous populations. Last June, a train carrying tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil derailed and caught fire near Mosier, Oregon, contaminating the Columbia River, which the Yakama Nation in Washington depends on. In South Dakota, the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota peoples fought off the Keystone XL pipeline that bisected treaty lands and, the tribes said, would lead to more pollution.

So when pipeline construction began on land just outside the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, and sacred burial sites were bulldozed in the process, it became a lightning rod for a broader struggle. “Water is life” is a rallying cry of the protests, and it’s a message that resonates as much with the Inca in South America as it does the Ojibwa in Canada.

“Cut the heads from the snakes!” said a man speaking at the prayer ceremony at the protest site, referring to oil pipelines everywhere. He wore camouflage pants and a feathered headdress. “Today, we hear about the Colonial pipeline.” He pauses. “That’s a good name for it, isn’t it?” He was referencing a recent eruption in the Colonial pipeline in Alabama that resulted in a massive oil spill.

The indigenous way of life is more immediately dependent on the natural world, and when nature is damaged, indigenous people are damaged. When the rivers are poisoned, indigenous people are poisoned. This immediacy is what has drawn so many indigenous people together to fight. But it’s time for non-indigenous people to understand that this is their fight too. Their livelihoods also depend on the success of the battle indigenous people are fighting right now.

This was the hottest summer on record, and global temperatures continue to rise. Earth’s biodiversity is under threat and so long as corporate profits continue to be prioritized over the planet, we will continue to slide into conditions that are increasingly inhospitable to life.

It’s a lesson indigenous people have already learned.

“The world needs us right now,” Nina Gualinga, an activist from the Sarayaku tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon said when her tribe arrived at Red Warrior Camp. The Sarayaku have fought Big Oil and won, and they hope to lend their strength to the protestors at Standing Rock. “The statistics say we are 4% of the population,” she went on, “but we are protecting more than 80% of the world’s biodiversity.”