Miywasin Moment: Overcoming anxiety opens doors for Cross Child

By JOLYNN PARENTEAU on August 18, 2021.

Tyra Cross Child used poetry to face her anxiety head on and wound up finding opportunity as well.--PHOTO BY JOLYNN PARENTEAU

Everyone gets anxious sometimes. If there’s one thing most of us can agree on these days, we are living in an anxiety-inducing time like no other. So where do we look for comfort? Tyra Cross Child will tell you to look your worry in the face, and call it your friend.

Drawing from emotions captured in her journals during her teen years, Cross Child wrote a powerful poem about the anxiety that consumed her all her young life, and then finally overcoming it.

“Dear Friend,” she wrote, “It was like you did not want me to succeed. You were like a trickster coming and going as you pleased … You are a part of me. I am a part of you. We are inseparable. So I have decided that I am going to call you my friend. I know I am not your only friend, you show up for others too. I know we are not true friends. Anxiety, you do not define us… Today you came here with me. Today you told me I shouldn’t dance! Guess what, I’m going to do it anyway.”

In 2019, Cross Child attended A Youth Explosion (AYE), an annual event hosted by Calgary-based social development agency Canada Bridges. AYE makes space for southern Alberta’s Indigenous youth to share their stories and lived experiences. At AYE that year, Cross Child felt inspired to share her poem onstage with friends and strangers alike. What followed next has uplifted many.

“A Letter To Anxiety” caught the attention of Trevor Solway, a Blackfoot filmmaker from Siksika Nation, whom Cross Child had met back in 2016 at a film camp for Indigenous youth.

In 2020, Solway brought together Cross Child and two other young actors, Chondra Fox and Wacey Little Light, to breathe life into Cross Child’s poem on film (watch it here: vimeo.com/555958150/ea34d2a6b8 on Vimeo).

When Solway’s short film, “Dear Friend,” landed in my inbox, I knew I had to meet the soft-spoken young woman behind the words.

On the hottest July afternoon, I’m introduced to Cross Child in her mother’s backyard. She tells me she still remembers her grandfather and grandmother speaking Blackfoot at home on the Blood Reserve, when she visited as a young girl.

Today, Cross Child recognizes that young people like her are beginning to show an interest in keeping their traditions and languages alive. Indeed, Miywasin Friendship Centre has launched free language classes this summer in Ojibway, Blackfoot, Michif, and Cree for anyone interested.

Cross Child is learning to make beaded jewelry, and working on sewing a traditional fancy dress to wear when she dances. Dancing builds her self-esteem, and Cross Child’s message to youth struggling with their mental health resonates.

“You are not alone, even if it may seem like it,” she says. “When I reached out, I learned it was OK to be vulnerable.”

Then she shares that she relaxes just like anyone.

“On my days off, I like to go to the movies and am looking forward to getting back to normal life.”

When asked what inspires her, Cross Child speaks of having more personal freedoms, more opportunities, more open doors to pursue her dreams than her mother and grandmother had. She believes in her peers’ ability to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma, the legacy of residential schools, and it begins with Indigenous youth taking education more seriously.

For her part, in September she’ll return to the University of Calgary to continue her International Indigenous Studies, working toward a Masters in Social Work and Community Development.

Since attending AYE in 2019, Cross Child has worked for Canada Bridges in the summers building a tutoring network on Treaty 7 land and providing Indigenous culture sensitivity training to educators. Her work in fostering healing in her community is a long road to walk; with determination, guess what, she’s going to do it anyway.