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HPL Writing Workshop - Narrative Therapy as Healing

In-Branch Program

A one‑hour, trauma‑informed workshop that teaches participants how they can begin healing through the stories they carry. Facilitated by psychotherapist Dawn C. Hill.

Join Dawn C. Hill for a one‑hour, trauma‑informed workshop that teaches participants how storytelling can help reclaim identity after experiencing oppression, racism, ethnocide, colonization, and long‑term emotional harm. We explore how trauma rewrites a person’s story through shame, fear, and indoctrination— and how narrative therapy helps people take that story back. Through gentle guided writing prompts, participants identify false stories others told about them and reconnect with the moments when their own body knew the truth. This workshop shows how storytelling organizes fragmented memories, restores voice, strengthens cultural connection, and helps survivors re‑author their lives with clarity and power. It’s accessible, grounding, and designed for anyone ready to begin healing through the stories they carry. Bring a pen and notebook or laptop.

Dawn Cheryl Hill, BA, MSW, RSW is the daughter of two residential school survivors. She is a beading artisan, published writer, and an enrolled member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, she recently discovered that her nation is Onondaga and her Clan is Deer, she also has Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and Ska꞉rù꞉ręʼ (Tuscarora) ancestry.

Her first book, Memory Keeper has been nominated for an Indigenous Voices Award; it has also received the 2022 First Nation Communities Read Long-list Award. Memory Keeper has also been selected as a recommended read by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She won the Ontario Native Women’s Association’s (ONWA) Every Story Matters Writing Competition, May 2024. Dawn is an Ambassador for the Chaney-Wenjack foundation. She is a board member of the Six Nations Public Library, the Mohawk Village Memorial Park (MVMP), and also a member of the North American Indigenous Women’s Association (NAIWA).

Dawn grew up at the Tuscarora Territory in Lewiston, NY. She currently resides at the Six Nations territory in Ohsweken, Ontario since 2016. Dawn holds a Bachelor of Arts in Community Mental Health and a Master of Social Work (BA/MSW) degree from the University at and Buffalo. She is a Registered Social Worker (RSW) with the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers (OCSWSSW) and the Ontario Association of Social Workers (OASW). She retired in May 2024 and opened her own private practice, Sacred Circle Therapy.

Her scholarly interests include intergenerational and multigenerational trauma, transmission of unresolved historical trauma, land-based healing, traditional healing, traditional medicines, addictions, domestic violence, sexual abuse, suicide contagion, epistemicide, epigenetics, and antiracist therapy.

Dawn utilizes many treatment modalities including ACT, CBT, DBT, EMDR, behavioral activation, and narrative therapy. She also incorporates traditional land-based healing methodologies into her practice.

Throughout her social work career Dawn has worked as a psychiatric social worker, psychotherapist, adult clinician, addictions counselor, director of behavioral health, medical social worker, drug court analyst, director of an independent living center, intensive family case manager, and a prevention case manager.