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Indigenous Peoples in Canada experience mental health concerns at unbalanced rates compared to non-Indigenous Canadians, but Indigenous Peoples reportedly “underuse” mainstream (i.e., Western) mental health services, like psychotherapy. Understanding how to “best” attend to the mental health needs of Indigenous Peoples with psychotherapy has largely been hypothetical and theoretical, with little input from Indigenous clients themselves. The current study used a narrative inquiry methodology approach to gain insight into perspectives and experiences of Western conventional psychotherapy among Indigenous Peoples (i.e., clients) in Turtle Island (aka Canada and the United States). The research question framing the current research was: What are Indigenous clients’ narratives of Western psychotherapy? Three Indigenous individuals from urban areas in Quebec and Ontario participated in in-depth interviews. In an endeavour to contribute to social justice aims, such as social change in the context of psychotherapy with Indigenous Peoples, I used a theoretical framing that embraced a social justice and decolonizing lens. The findings conveyed the following main themes: perceptions about therapy, significance of the therapeutic connection, role of power dynamics, role of Indigenous culture, and impacts from research participation. Implications for psychotherapy as it relates to power dynamics are discussed, and potential contributions are offered in the hopes that the psychotherapy field may continue to better address the mental health needs of Indigenous Peoples in Canada through a decolonizing approach.

Recently scholars involved in narrative analysis seem to have overlooked the role of the narrator and overemphasized that of the readers. They even have different perspectives on the identification of the readers. Whoever the reader is, they place an omnipotent ability onto the reader as the master of interpreting the biblical narratives so that the reader maintains an unchanged position in this field but the narrator loses his/her effect. Such a tendency becomes more problematic in dealing with biblical characterization. With this problem in mind, the principal objective of this dissertation is to demonstrate the dynamic relationship between the narrative themes and characters created by the Lukan narrator rather than the reader in the Infancy Narrative. This study considers the narrator as the main entity who creates the narrative themes, especially in relation to the narrative characters, and presents a model of narrative analysis which has been formalized for the study of the Luke's thematic characterization in the Infancy Narrative (Luke 1-2). The main question of the dissertation is two-fold: 1) how does the narrator characterize his characters for the sake of his narrative themes?; 2) What is the thematic function of the Infancy Narrative in the Lukan Gospel in relation to the narrator's thematization of the characters? In order to answer this question, this study suggests three steps for analyzing the narrative. One is to define the types of characters (on-stage: front ground, foreground, and background; and off-stage: setting and potential), another is to determine narrative themes based upon three dimensions (textual, intertextual, and extratextual), and the other is to observe thematic relations between the characters in the Infancy Narrative and the following parts of the Lukan Gospel. With these steps, this study defmes all characters of the Infancy Narrative and evaluates their thematic roles, and the narrator's themes conveyed by his characters. Lastly, after examining the thematic coherence through narrative characters in the Gospel, this dissertation attests that the Infancy Narrative is a well-designed thematic introduction of the Gospel which establishes the major themes of the Gospel, conveyed by the divine characters (God, the Holy Spirit, and the angel), John, Jesus, and others. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The current age of AIDS has seen the emergence of a body of literature whose goal it is to make AIDS, its multifarious meanings and overwhelmingly devastating effects, not only visible, but also somehow comprehensible to as many people as possible. Much of this literature is produced by gay men and women, who are among the most intimate witnesses to the AIDS crisis. This thesis explores three AIDS narratives as manifestations of the writers' responsibilities as witnesses to and of HIV and AIDS. The first chapter examines Amy Hoffman's Hospital Time as an act of mourning through which she seeks to shape the reader as a mourner. Mourning is a responsibility, I argue, that Hoffman does not allow the reader to refuse. Reading Derek Jarman's diary Modern Nature through Jacques Derrida's reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo in The Ear of the Other, Chapter Two theorizes the activist potential of the "signature." Through his garden, Jarman demonstrates how he produces a signature for his dead friends, enabling them to "live" eternally. With this signature Jarman sculpts the reader's own signature, the signature through which he intends for the reader to grant him "life" after death. It is the exposition of the possibility of life through the signature that Jarman understands as his responsibility as a witness to AIDS. And finally, Chapter Three examines Dale Peck's Martin and John as a theorization of the "middle ground" between dominant culture's representations of HIV and AIDS and AIDS activist representations. As a metafictional text, the structure of the novel requests the reader to interpret and negotiate recursively these representations. It is this very request that Peck illustrates as his responsibility. Thus, the writers' foremost responsibility, I propose, is to reproduce in the reader what the writer understands as his or her own responsibilities in witnessing AIDS. The reader must become the witness. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

A collection of poetry that primarily deals with Appalachian voice and environmental issues, navigating queer identities in rural spaces, and violence against the female body. / MFA

After Horses is a a collection of narrative and verse poems centered loosely around the idea or theme of how to create meaning from the fracture and detritus of daily life. Also under obsessive consideration throughout: loneliness, the risk of human connection, the risk of a lack of human connection, the impossibility of language, hope as illuminating and good thing, hope as desperate and devouring thing, and an underlying fear and awareness of the fact that no one can be sure of what ultimately matters, anyway. / Master of Fine Arts

In designing a sacred space, the work should be a product not only of the mechanics of the mind but also a response of the heart, and therefore the spirit or soul that an architect must possess. For the soul is the harmony between the two. This is what gets diffused into the work, the subjectivity of which gives it its reality. The work too can then become animate with soul. Mircea Eliade believed that through symbols, the world becomes transparent and transcendence becomes visible. The religious man therefore relies on symbols to recognize sacred reality. "Divine work always preserves its quality of transparency, that is it spontaneously reveals the many aspects of the sacred," which is why the very existence of the cosmic system and everything within presents itself as a proof of divine presence.1 For the construction of a sanctuary, the goal is to be able to perceive what is sacred in the mundane, and then bringing it forth, extracting it, distinguishing it to be experienced sensually. Sacred architecture is what identifies and then exposes these hierophanies. The site is located on the intersection of Pennsylvania Ave NW and 26th ST NW in Washington DC. For the design development, the story of the first revelation of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is used as a narrative through the project. His search for meaning and retreat into nature, teaches of Islamic monasticism, the path that leads completely inward to a place with no one but God. "Every road will lead you to this sense of initiation " the light, the secret, are hidden in the place from which you set out. You are on your way not toward the end of the road but toward its beginning; to go is to return; to find is to rediscover." 2 / Master of Architecture

This thesis explores how architecture, like literature and fi lm, uses narrative techniques to tell a story. The museum exemplifies this concept of architecture as a narrative medium, as its social mandate is to articulate a topic and educate visitors. Through the rehabilitation of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, this thesis aims to improve the museum’s spatial qualities and configuration. A series of interventions are designed to frame spaces throughout the historic site, reflecting the historical events that took place there. These spaces tell the story of one million immigrants and Canadian military personnel who entered Canada at this site.