falling is not falling but offering

Transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi´ engaged Cherokee Street and St. Louis’s complex histories with indigeneity and erasure through performance, poetry, and letterpress posters at FOAM. The project, falling is not falling but offering took its title from a Wendy Rose poem and involved reprinting words and poems by Indigenous heroes as an act of honoring, remembering, and dedication through the radical history of the letterpress. The labor and process of the letterpress became a symbolic act of ritualistic ceremony of healing from erasure, murder, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy. Sited in the shadow of a contentious statue of a Cherokee chief that acts as an entrance to the neighborhood, DinéYazhi´ offered an alternate inhabitation of the street’s and nation’s Indigenous ground.