INTRODUCTION
This reading guide is designed to accompany Monique Gray Smith’s picture book You Hold Me Up. We hold the belief that anti-racist and liberatory practice is a process of learning (and unlearning) over time. Reading Is Resistance sees reading as an opportunity to seed deeper conversations and possibilities for action around racial justice in our communities.
Lesson content was written by Zapoura Newton-Calvert and was designed to start and deepen anti-bias/anti-racist conversations in families and other learning communities.
BOOK THEMES
IDENTITY, RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS, BELONGING, FAMILY
BOOK SUMMARY
You Hold Me Up is a beautiful, tender book with multiple layers of meaning. It is at once a narrative about how to care for one another in any context and also a story about Indigenous communities healing from harms perpetuated within the U.S and Canadian residential school systems.