You Hold Me Up / Gimanaadenim

Encourage children to show love and support for each other and to consider each other's well-being in their everyday actions.

Consultant, international speaker and award-winning author Monique Gray Smith wrote You Hold Me Up to prompt a dialogue among young people, their care providers and educators about reconciliation and the importance of the connections children make with others. With vibrant illustrations from celebrated artist Danielle Daniel, this is a foundational book about building relationships, fostering empathy and encouraging respect between peers, starting with our littlest citizens.

Orca Book Publishers is proud to offer this picture book as a dual-language (English and Anishinaabemowin) edition.

Monique Gray Smith is a mixed-heritage woman of Cree, Lakota and Scottish ancestry and a proud mom of twins. Monique is an accomplished consultant, writer and international speaker. Her first novel, Tilly: A Story of Hope and Resilience, won the 2014 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature. Monique's picture book My Heart Fills With Happiness won the Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize and was selected as the TD Grade One Giveaway Book for all first-grade students in Canada in 2019. Monique and her family are blessed to live on Lekwungen territory in Victoria, British Columbia.

Angela Mesic currently teaches the first year Anishinaabemowin course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and provides online long-distance learning for Yale University. She obtained her bachelor's degree in the field of psychology at UWM and is currently working on a master of community psychology at Alverno College. Angela has a strong interest in research focused on the psychology of learning and curriculum development. Through the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education at UWM, she assists the director, Dr. Margaret Noodin, in making significant revisions to language curriculum, and handles curricular queries from various internal and external partners, including Indian Community School, several colleges and universities throughout the United States, and tribal communities.

Margaret Noodin received an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she also serves as director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education and a scholar in the Center for Water Policy. She is the author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature and two bilingual collections of poetry, Weweni and Gijigijigikendan: What the Chickadee Knows. Her poems are also anthologized in New Poets of Native Nations, Poetry, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Water Stone Review and Yellow Medicine Review. Her research spans linguistic revitalization, Indigenous ontologies, traditional science and prevention of violence in Indigenous communities. To see and hear current projects visit www.ojibwe.net, where she and other students and speakers of Ojibwe have created space for language to be shared by academics and the Native community.