In Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock everyone has a cold.  Jack Dalrymple, the governor of North Dakota, had just issued an emergency evacuation of the camp, citing extreme cold on the way and unsanitary living conditions. An undercurrent of insecure moralizing pervaded the camp — everyone wanted to know if you were there to devote yourself to the Sioux or if you had only come to post about it on Facebook, reports Vice Magazine.

"At Standing Rock, an economy of “being there” replaced the assumptions of shared liberal beliefs, and, in some way, staved off the inevitable divisions. Everyone  kept score on who had been there “since the beginning,” but there was still an abiding  acknowledgment that everyone, save the media, had put their bodies in the path of the pipeline. The warmth behind this recognition, which expressed itself in friendly smiles, the sharing of food and firewood, and an abiding spirit of charity (any time you heard the high-pitched whirr of tires stuck in the snow, you’d see a line of people jogging over to help  the driver), inspired activists, whether from Black Lives Matter, environmental or legal movements as well as Trump-supporting veterans to come to North Dakota and walk unsteadily over the sheet of ice that covered the Oceti Sakowin camp. Ultimately, what mattered was that they had bothered to come at all — the physical trumped the ideological.

Read more about the life camp at Standing Rock in Vice magazine this week.