Like many Standing Rock Lakota, Loretta is from several generations of veterans. Her father, Joseph Grey Day, was awarded a medal as a code talker. The night before, I had been at the first veterans’ gathering at Sitting Bull tribal college. There, I met Duane Vermillion, a local Marine and Vietnam veteran who was unsurprised that so many veterans were arriving. “If a call is put out to ask for help, our friends will answer,” he said. Duane’s grandfather George Sleeps From Home was also a code talker, and Duane’s father served in Korea.

Native Americans have always maintained an outsize presence in the military, serving on a per-capita basis in higher numbers than any other ethnic group. American Indians fought in the Civil War and World War I before we even had citizenship. Many Native Americans volunteered to serve in World War II and Korea before they were included in the Voting Rights Act, and in Vietnam before the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978.

That’s right. In a country founded on religious freedom, Native Americans were not granted the right to legally practice our own religions until 1978.

Since then, indigenous spirituality has become a powerful uniting force. Each tribal nation has its own rituals and observances, but we hold in common the conviction that our earth is a living mystery upon whose tolerance we depend.

In the Missouri Breaks, you feel that presence acutely. But the flat aqua expanse of Lake Oahe in view of the Oceti Sakowin camp is another story. The lake isn’t natural, and was forced on tribal people when the Army Corps flooded the fertile bottomlands of the Missouri River. Up north, the project displaced the Hidatsa, Mandan and Arikara people. Down here, the Lakota. After so many other acts of dispossession, it was said that many elders died of broken hearts.

The Black Snake is what Lakota people call the Dakota Access Pipeline. It will extinguish the world. For a people who have endured the end of their way of life so many times, who can doubt the truth of their vision, which coincides with scientific truth about the relationship of fossil fuels to catastrophic climate change?

On Monday, I said goodbye to Loretta, who packed me an egg sandwich. I drove home chased by snow. Along I-94 there were the familiar signs, simple black-and-white admonitions, Be Nice, and Be Polite. It could have been the camp motto. So many young non-Native people have been drawn to this cause. I thought about the spindly girl with wild ringlets, smiling as she served me a plate of wontons and strawberries in the food tent. I worried. Did she have wool socks? A subzero sleeping bag? After a blizzard, there is usually deep cold.