"As artists, we live on the periphery. But we are the mirrors. We are the reflective points that break through a barrier." -Cannupa Hanska Luger, L.A. TIMES
The Mirror Shield Project was initiated by artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) in 2016 in support of the Water Protectors at Oceti Sakowin Camp near Standing Rock, North Dakota. What began as an urgent response to the Dakota Access Pipeline became an open-source call to action: a project conceived by Luger, but made possible through the hands, bodies, and collective participation of thousands of people.
For Luger, the project began close to home. He grew up on the Standing Rock Reservation, and in 2016 the Dakota Access Pipeline threatened the water and culturally significant landscapes of his homelands. The nearly 1,200-mile oil pipeline was planned to cross beneath Lake Oahe on the Missouri River approximately half a mile upstream from the Standing Rock Reservation. Over the course of many months, thousands of people from across the United States and around the world traveled to the camps near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, to stand with the Indigenous-led movement protecting the water.
Luger recognized that as an artist, he had access to a larger creative community that could be mobilized in solidarity. He began thinking about how a reflective surface might function on a frontline—not only as protection, but as a way to reflect humanity back to those enacting force.
Because glass could shatter and injure the people carrying it, Luger developed a lightweight, inexpensive shield using readily available materials. The instructions were intentionally simple: one sheet of board could become six shields. Add reflective Mylar, drill holes, attach rope handles. Lightweight mirrored shields, ready for frontline action.
While an Artist-in-Residence at the Institute of American Indian Arts in November 2016, Luger worked with Oglala Lakota/Diné filmmaker Razelle Benally to create How to Build Mirror Shields for Water Protectors, an instructional film demonstrating the making process Luger developed and shared openly through social media. The call invited people anywhere to make shields and send them to Standing Rock. They did.
Within weeks, people across the country created and transported more than a thousand mirrored shields to Oceti Sakowin Camp. Water Protectors, artists, activists, students, families, and anonymous community members made additional shields onsite. Once the idea entered the collective, authorship expanded through participation. The shields became available to Water Protectors throughout the camps for use in peaceful direct actions.
“Art can be an incredible tool when you’re fighting aggression since it’s a language that transcends barriers”. -Cannupa Hanska Luger
From the beginning, Luger imagined the mirrored shields not only as a form of protection, but as a way to turn the gaze of surveillance back upon itself. As the project began to circulate, artist and friend Rory Erler Wakemup (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe) responded to Luger’s vision, helping bring it to scale through community organizing and collective action. Wakemup mobilized his Minneapolis community to create hundreds of shields with support from Forecast Public Art and other local organizations, and invited Luger to lead a mirror-shield-making workshop at All My Relations Arts. Together, they transported the shields to Oceti Sakowin Camp.
On November 18, 2016, Luger and Wakemup worked with the Water Protector community at Oceti Sakowin to organize and realize a large-scale action using the shields. During a practice run, hundreds of Water Protectors moved through the camp holding mirrored shields overhead, their bodies forming a river or serpent-like shape visible from above. Wakemup documented the rehearsal by drone, archiving the moment. The action that followed was created for a different audience: the police surveillance aircraft continually circling above Oceti Sakowin. No drone footage of the final action was recorded. As the Water Protectors moved through the landscape, the reflective surfaces turned skyward, returning the apparatus of surveillance to those watching from above.
The shields continued to appear in actions throughout the movement. On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, Water Protectors carried mirrored shields during an action at Turtle Island, a sacred site near Oceti Sakowin Camp, where they gathered in prayer and faced a line of militarized police. Images from that day capture the police reflected back in a wall of mirrored shields—one of the clearest expressions of the project’s intention to reflect humanity back to those enacting force.
In early December, more than a thousand U.S. military veterans mobilized to Standing Rock in solidarity with the Water Protectors. Mirrored shields and other forms of creative expression and DIY protection continued to appear amid direct actions in which Water Protectors faced rubber bullets, chemical agents, and water cannons. Even under these harsh conditions, creativity remained a form of resilience—a way to stand against oppression, protect one another, and assert humanity in the face of violence.
INDIGENOUS LIBERATION IN PRACTICE
The Mirror Shield Project emerged from a much larger movement of Indigenous liberation already underway at Standing Rock. The first Water Protector camp, Sacred Stone Camp, was established in April 2016, and as the movement grew through the summer, thousands of people gathered in additional camps, including Oceti Sakowin. By the fall of that year, when Luger developed and launched the Mirror Shield Project, the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline had grown into a powerful Indigenous-led movement. It was not simply an environmental campaign against a pipeline, but an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty, relationship, and responsibility to land, water, and future generations. As scholars Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon write of #NoDAPL, “The movement reignited the fire of Indigenous liberation.” The Mirror Shield Project was Luger’s contribution to this larger movement: an artwork conceived not simply to represent resistance, but to become useful within it.
The mirrored shield is not a new technology. Reflective surfaces appear deep within human history and storytelling as tools of protection, revelation, and confrontation. In Greek mythology, Perseus uses the reflection of his polished shield to confront Medusa without looking directly at her; across centuries of Chinese culture, bronze mirrors have carried protective qualities, believed to reveal or repel harmful spirits. More recently, during the 2013–14 Maidan uprising in Ukraine, demonstrators carried mirrors to the frontlines, holding them toward riot police so that the officers were confronted with their own reflections—an action that directly inspired The Mirror Shield Project. Luger understood his design as a contemporary contribution to this much longer continuum: a simple technology reactivated against modern monsters, including systems of extraction and capitalism.
At Standing Rock, the mirrored surface functioned as both shield and point of human engagement. Raised toward a line of police, it returned their image to them. The gesture attempted to interrupt the abstraction of a frontline and reveal the human being behind the uniform. Rather than simply creating another barrier between opposing sides, the mirror asked each person to recognize themselves within the conflict and remember the water that sustains everyone.
The Mirror Shield Project also offered a way for people who could not travel to Standing Rock to participate materially. One person could buy a standard sized board and make six shields. Those shields could travel hundreds of miles and enter the hands of Water Protectors holding a frontline. A humble act of making in one place could become an act of solidarity somewhere else. The Mirror Shield Project demonstrates how art can put Indigenous liberation into practice.
The Mirror Shield Project began with an idea developed by Cannupa Hanska Luger, but its power has always depended upon collective participation. Luger conceived the project as open source, allowing the idea to move beyond the artist and take on a life of its own. Its history belongs to the many hands and communities that brought it into being: the artists, organizations, students, families, and community members who organized actions, documented the work, made and transported shields, and supported the project in countless ways; the Water Protectors who carried and activated them; and the anonymous makers who continue to adapt and carry the idea forward.
In the decade since Standing Rock, the Mirror Shield Project has continued to move between frontline action, Indigenous land and water defense, community making, performance, exhibition, and scholarship. Mirrored shields have surfaced in resistance movements beyond #NoDAPL. In Minnesota, shields made with Luger and students at the University of Wisconsin–Stout were created for continued use in Stop Line 3 actions opposing the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, extending the project into another Indigenous-led movement defending land and water. Mirrored shields also appeared anonymously in Black Lives Matter actions across the United States in 2020.
The project has circulated through museums and exhibitions nationally and internationally, including Water Pressure: Designing for the Future in Germany and Austria and Candice Hopkins’s traveling exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, as well as presentations at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Swiss Institute in New York. The project has also entered critical and scholarly discourse, including Kate Morris’s Shifting Grounds: Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art and Michelle H. Raheja’s essay “Indigenous Post-Apocalyptic Filmmaking at Standing Rock.”
In many of these presentations, the Mirror Shield Project has remained active rather than archival. Communities have been invited to make and activate new shields locally, continuing the project’s participatory methodology and allowing the work to move beyond exhibition spaces and into community and social-action projects.
Because the design was released as open source, much of the project's life beyond Standing Rock remains decentralized and uncredited. The reach cannot be fully traced and perhaps that is precisely the point. Ten years later, mirrored shields continue to be made, adapted, activated, and reimagined, often anonymously, in resistance movements and performance activations around the world. The larger movement for Indigenous liberation continues to grow and take new forms; asserting sovereignty, defending land and water, strengthening relationships, and imagining futures beyond colonial systems. Within this living movement, the Mirror Shield Project continues in process, adapted, and activated, and its free form is carried forward not through ownership, but through participation.