I applaud The Boston Globe for Dugan Arnett’s front-page spread, “Devotion, despair fill teeming N.D. camp’’ (A1, Nov. 28). The Globe has taken significant moral leadership to cover the human side of Standing Rock with portraits of people on the ground.

I suggest a terminology amendment, however. The reason folks at Standing Rock call themselves “water protectors,’’ not “protesters,’’ is that they are fighting for, not against, which I learned at the camps myself this month. Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people understand their fight to protect water to be a fight for the future of all humanity, not just native peoples. “Protest’’ connotes a narrative of conflict rather than a narrative of hope, and more dangerously, it potentially continues the demonization of a group of people our Declaration of Independence calls “merciless Indian savages.’’ But the reason this is such a powerful movement is that praying people have unified under a vision of what is sacred about life as a human being — which is, perhaps, the least “savage’’ thing going on in America right now. That is why I support Standing Rock: It helped me to live more truly as a human being.

Hilary Davis

Revere