Stories From Our Road to Washington

Written by Kathleen McEuen, One Million Bones National Liaison

This Saturday, April 28, 2012 is a really big day for us here at One Million Bones. We get to witness 34 capitals across the nation stand together in unity against genocide and mass atrocities by participating in the Road to Washington Campaign.

If you haven’t heard the story about how the Road to Washington came to be, it’s actually quite endearing. It was about a week or so before the Albuquerque 50,000 Bones Preview installation and Susan, Naomi and myself were making bones and just chatting about “what’s next” for One Million Bones when Susan replied “I really think having a mini installation in every State Capital would be so powerful”. Naomi and I obviously thought she was crazy, after organizing the one installation, we couldn’t even conceptualize organizing fifty.

We took away a lot from that first installation last August. I think one of the biggest surprises we encountered that day was how much participating in an installation can change a person and community. Suddenly, Susan’s fifty state campaign didn’t seem so crazy, it actually seemed like a good idea and thus, the Road to Washington Campaign was born.

What has been most amazing for me is to see these groups of leaders transform their communities. There have been so many success stories and I wanted to take some time to share a couple of them here. The International Studies Student Club at the University of Wyoming is a smaller student group but they have poured their hearts into creating an amazing event this Saturday for the Cheyenne community. They brought in Carl Wilkens to speak to their campus and coordinated bone making events across the state of Wyoming. What really touched my heart was this quote from Allison Beaufort: “We also won outstanding Student Organization of the year this year for our efforts, which was amazing – our club has never been recognized for anything!” To witness a small student group engage their campus and educate about these atrocities and then provide them with a direct action, the making of an artwork bone is so powerful and then for them to be recognized by the university for their efforts gives us an immense pride and inspires us to continue this work.

You can’t talk about a community embracing this project without mentioning One Million Bones/Tallahassee organizer, Jane McPherson. Through her leadership, the Tallahassee community has not only participated in this project but have accepted it with open arms making the Tallahassee installation the largest Road to Washington event. Jane started out with the goal of having 2,500 bones made for this weekend and now, because of the community support they've had, they’ll be laying down 6,547 bones. She has been featured in Tallahassee.com, ABC, the FSU College of Social Work Students on FAMU TV and many others!

On April 7, Naomi with a New Orleans based volunteer team organized another amazing 50,000 bones installation. One of the volunteers from that event, Dana Nguyen helped start the One Million Bones Baton Rouge Chapter based out of Louisiana State University who will be organizing the Baton Rouge event this Saturday. The chapter’s president, Firan Chauhan, and Dana have worked tirelessly, not only through the 50,000 bones installation but have continued on to create another meaningful installation for the greater New Orleans community featuring 5,000 handmade bones.

There are many other schools, groups, chapters and students who have made this journey memorable for us and we hope to speak more to that in the weeks to come. We consider ourselves so lucky to have such supportive and dedicated volunteers. We hope everyone can make it out to an event this Saturday! 

I'm so thankful to be able to share these stories with you and hope to share many more!