In 1987, James Luna walked into the Museum of Man in San Diego, stripped to a loincloth, and lay down in a display case on a bed of sand. He placed his divorce papers beside him. His college diploma. His favorite records. Labels described his scars — this one from a bar fight, this one from alcoholism. Museum visitors leaned over to read the placards before they realized the artifact was breathing.

He lay there for hours. When someone got too close, he shifted. The visitors flinched. They had come to look at Native objects. They were not prepared to be looked at back.

Luna died in 2018. His work is in an exhibition that opened yesterday in Santa Fe.

The exhibition is called Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969. SITE Santa Fe and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts are co-hosting it — over 100 artworks by more than 40 artists and collectives, curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation). It is the first major exhibition to argue that performance — not painting, not sculpture, not the “traditional arts” the market expects — is the origin point of contemporary Native art.

The year 1969 is the anchor. That November, 89 members of Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island for 19 months. They cited the Treaty of Fort Laramie: abandoned federal land reverts to the people who once held it. The penitentiary had closed in 1963. The island was surplus. The occupation was, in the language the government understands, a property claim. In the language of everything else, it was performance — bodies in a space that was supposed to be empty, refusing to leave, broadcasting Radio Free Alcatraz to anyone who would listen.

That same year, at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Lloyd Kiva New and collaborators published a treatise on Native artistic self-determination. The exhibition treats these two events — an occupation and a manifesto, both 1969, both about the right to define the terms — as the moment contemporary Native art stopped asking permission.

The show has toured from Bard College in New York to the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Saskatchewan. The Santa Fe version is the most expansive. It includes Rebecca Belmore, Nicholas Galanin, Kent Monkman, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Dyani White Hawk, Spiderwoman Theater. And Cannupa Hanska Luger.

Luger is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota. He grew up on the Standing Rock reservation. In the summer of 2016, when the Dakota Access Pipeline threatened the water of his father’s homelands, he made a tutorial video and posted it online. It showed how to build a mirrored shield from cheap materials — reflective Mylar, cardboard, tape. He asked people to make them and send them to the Oceti Sakowin camp.

Over a thousand shields arrived.

In December 2016, more than a thousand U.S. veterans traveled to Standing Rock and held those mirrored shields on the front line. The police in body armor, the officers with rubber bullets and water cannons at 23 degrees, the TigerSwan mercenaries who called the water protectors “jihadists” — they looked at the line of shields and saw themselves.

“The mirrored shield is not a new concept,” Luger said. “Perseus used the mirrored shield to defeat Medusa.”

You cannot look at the monster directly. You look at its reflection.

“Standing Rock never became a hashtag for me. It’s always been home.”

The pipeline pumps 750,000 barrels a day. Capacity doubled. Tar sands expansion is planned for 2028. The EIS took nine years, the tribe rejected it, the oil never paused. By every metric that pipelines understand, the pipeline won.

The mirror shields are in a museum now. But here is the thing the exhibition gets right, the thing the title holds if you listen: the word theater has three meanings.

The first is performance art. The body as medium. Luna in the display case. Luger’s shields on the front line. Spiderwoman Theater on stage since 1976. The act of being present, being visible, being impossible to look away from.

The second is military theater. A theater of operations. Standing Rock was classified as one — TigerSwan’s internal documents used counterinsurgency language. The police treated the water protectors as combatants. The “theater” was a stretch of North Dakota where people were tear-gassed for standing near water.

The third is security theater. The performance of protection that protects nothing. The environmental impact statement that took nine years and changed nothing. The consultations that were legally required and functionally ignored.

Indian Theater holds all three. The exhibition does not pick one. It asks which theater you are watching.

On July 11, SITE Santa Fe is hosting a Mirror Shield Workshop. Luger will teach people to build the shields. Not look at them behind glass. Build them. Take them home.

The art is still a tool. The tool is still a mirror.

“I liked the idea of bringing these mirrored shields to the front line to create a barrier that actually unites rather than separates,” Luger said. “Remind the riot police that we are trying to protect water for them and their children as well.”

James Luna lay in a museum case and made the museum look at itself. Cannupa Hanska Luger put a thousand mirrors on a front line and made the police look at themselves. Eighty-nine people occupied a prison island and made the government look at itself.

The pattern is older than any of them. The tool is always the same.

Look.

// NEON BLOOD