Making the Medicine Shield

Reconstructed as a doable making-practice from Andrews’s shield teaching:

1. Choose the shield’s subject. Pick one thing the shield is about: a quality to claim (courage, voice, steadiness), a life-passage to honour (a leaving, a healing, a threshold), or a self you are integrating. Name it in a sentence. Andrews’s framing — fitting shattered pieces into a whole — means the subject is usually something you are gathering in yourself.
2. Make the round base. Form a circle — a hoop, a stiff card disc, a round of fabric or hide-substitute, a wreath. The circle is the wheel of a whole self; keep it a size you can hold or hang.
3. Gather your symbols slowly. Over days, collect things that mean the subject to you: colours, a feather found on a walk, a stone, fabric, a written word, an image, a small object with a story. Let some come by noticing — Andrews’s tradition reads meaningful coincidence as part of the gathering (the supported part is simply that you assign the meaning).
4. Place each piece with intention. As you fix each item, say (aloud or inwardly) what it stands for and why it belongs: “this stone is the steadiness I’m claiming.” The deliberate naming is what turns craft into self-statement. Don’t rush; arrange and rearrange until it feels true.
5. Let it be honest, not pretty. A shield can hold the hard pieces too — a torn cloth for grief, a dark spot for fear faced. Andrews’s wholeness includes the shadow, not just the polished self.
6. Close and place it. When it feels complete, mark that — a breath, a spoken line of what the whole shield now says about you. Hang or stand it somewhere you’ll see it daily.
7. Let it work as a cue, and update it. Returning to the visible shield re-states the intention over time. As you change, you may add to it or make a new one for a new passage; Andrews treats shields as markers of stages, not permanent fixtures. (Sourcing note: Andrews describes shield-making through narrated apprenticeship rather than as a numbered kit; the steps above are a faithful, usable reconstruction. The quoted line on “fitting together the shattered pieces of oneself” is short attributed quotation.)

Lynn V. Andrews (c.1940–2022) built “the teaching of the shields” across the Medicine Woman series, especially Flight of the Seventh Moon (1984) and Spirit Woman (1988), attributing it to her teachers Agnes Whistling Elk and Ruby Plenty Chiefs and the “Sisterhood of the Shields.”.

A necessary note on the evidence on lineage. Medicine shields are real, sacred objects in several Native American cultures, and Andrews’s accounts of her shield teaching are widely disputed — read by many scholars and Native writers as fiction and as “plastic shamanism” that appropriates and misrepresents genuine indigenous practice.

This entry makes no claim of authentic indigenous transmission and does not present the practice as making a real Native medicine shield. It offers only the generic, transmissible psychological act — assembling chosen personal symbols into a deliberate object of self-definition — and disclaims both the lineage claims and any notion that the object holds occult power.

Make your shield from your own meanings and materials, not by imitating or borrowing the sacred forms of living traditions.

Building a personal object of symbols to focus identity and intention is widely practised; Andrews’s version is distinctive in framing it as reassembling a whole self on a circular shield: - Vision boarding — arranging images of a desired life to keep it salient; the shield is its three-dimensional, ritualised, identity-centred cousin.

• The despacho (Villoldo) — also assembles meaningful items with spoken intention, but as a gratitude offering meant to be released/burned, not a kept self-statement.
• Art therapy / collage of self — making the inner world visible and integrable through hands-on image-making.
• The “I AM” Presence chart (Ballard) — a fixed visual focus for identity, though doctrinal rather than personally assembled.

Making it pretty instead of true. A shield that only shows the polished self is decoration; let it hold the shadow pieces too — that’s where the integration is.

• Skipping the naming. Silently gluing things on loses the active ingredient. Say what each piece means and why it belongs.
• Treating it as a talisman. It anchors and re-states your intention; it doesn’t protect you or cause results. Pair it with real action.
• Appropriating sacred forms. Don’t copy a specific tribe’s shield, regalia, or symbols. Build from your own meanings and materials (see Source & Lineage).
• Doing it once and forgetting it. The cueing effect needs the shield seen; place it where it stays in your daily view, and remake it as you move into a new passage.