Nova Scotia shooting victims offered dance of prayer and healing by P.E.I. Mi'kmaq woman

Wyonna Bernard did not tell anyone she was coming. She just showed up at the RCMP detachment in  Charlottetown, where the flag was at half mast, wearing a traditional jingle dress she began to dance.

It was a dance of prayer, mourning, and healing for the victims of the mass shooting in Nova Scotia last weekend. At least 22 people were killed by the gunman, including RCMP officer Constable Heidi Stevenson.

"I have a few loved ones who actually are policemen, so I was deeply saddened," said Bernard, of the Abegweit First Nation.

"To hear how many victims there were and the families that they left behind, just complete shock, disbelief."

For years dance has been healing for her, said Bernard, and it was on her mind right away that she wanted to dance in memory of the tragedy.

Bernard has had a lot of reaction to her offering since she posted a video on her Facebook page, and in particular the significance of the side step jingle dance she chose.

"It's said that in the early nineteen hundreds the jingle dress came to a medicine man in a dream," she told Island Morning's Mitch Cormier.

"He had this really, really sick granddaughter. So he had dreamed of this dress that had all these jingles, and it made a very healing sound that the creator could hear. So he had built this dress for his granddaughter. But when she first put it on she was too sick. She couldn't dance alone. So her community and her family helped her. They had to carry her, and as she progressed she got stronger and stronger and she was able to dance alone by the end of the song."

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