By Julian White-Davis, Photo Editor
Cozily packed into a small, dimly lit office strewn with papers and drawings, Bill Moyer sits back in a worn chair and begins his story. The lamp light plays gently across his youthful smile and jazzy dark curls as his potent words meander from the whimsical adventures of his youth to his current war against inequality, corruption and hatred.
Moyer has spent nearly half a century rising through the activist community and is now the head of a nationally known activist organization called The Backbone Campaign.
Activism has been a major part of Moyer’s life since his childhood. His father worked with many different Native American tribes in the Puget Sound area, which caused Moyer to spend a substantial amount of time on reservations.
“It was a really strong education around racism and poverty,” Moyer said. “There was a lot of blatant racism and violence against Native Americans.”
Moyer’s father encouraged him to defend causes that he believed in. He led by example, once taking bolt cutters to the site of a pipeline that crossed Swinomish tribal land. He threatened to flip the shut-off valve and shut down the pipeline, prompting the oil company to agree to go into negotiations about compensating the tribe for an easement.
Moyer also cites his mother’s dedication to social justice and his Catholic upbringing as important motivators for his incessant passion for activism.
“Taking seriously what I was hearing in church about loving one another and such shaped me and shaped my perspective on the world,” Moyer said.
After high school, Moyer went to Alaska and worked in the salmon processing industry, earning money for a trip to Africa and Europe.
“[The trip] was pretty much just to experience the world. I took six and a half months and lived on the streets and hitchhiked around,” Moyer said. “It was a great trip, but it was also a great opportunity to get an outside perspective on U.S. policies around the world and the impacts [of] those policies.”
When Moyer returned to the U.S. he attended Seattle University and took courses in American Philosophy, Political Science and other related subjects. There, he learned about the fundamental assumptions and desires that govern the way people treat one another.
“There’s a belief that material wealth is a reflection that you’re going to heaven or are part of the elect, so then it’s not so much of materialism anymore as it is the idealization of material — giving it a spiritual value,” Moyer said. “That’s in conflict with a different ethic that we’re all in this together, and that salvation is the experience of the community. What our capitalist system encourages is destructive to our collective well-being and the planet.”
While Moyer studied these fundamentals about America, he lived in a van. His only income came from playing music and selling plasma from his blood. But after about two-and-a-half years, he decided to drop out and move to a Navajo reservation near the Four Corners called Big Mountain.
“I lived with a Dine Elder who was resisting a relocation,” Moyer said. “I spent about six months [there] off and on, herding sheep and goats and cutting wood and washing dishes. It was a very small and extended version of Standing Rock.”
Moyer moved to Vashon Island in 1989, where he built a cabin in the woods and began working with local artisans and making drums.
This period of time was vital to Moyer’s later creation of the Backbone Campaign.
One night after finishing an artist-in-residence project, Moyer climbed a tree to watch the sunset while eating dinner: a burrito cooked over a camp stove. Watching the birds flit from tree to tree and seeing the roll of the land from his perch high up above the canopy, he felt a particular connection with the beauty of nature.
That was when the branch broke.
“‘This could be it’ was all I had time to think of and then bam! I hit the ground,” Moyer said. “I couldn’t believe it. I was still conscious. My arms weren’t broken and my legs weren’t broken. Then I tried to get up. And that was when it got really scary. I had shattered T12, L1 and L2 [vertebra in the spinal column], so there was nothing connecting the idea of getting up with the actual body.”
In other words, his body didn’t have the power to adhere to his brain’s command.
Fortunately, a friend of Moyer’s came over shortly thereafter, as they had plans to spend the evening together.
“He called 911 and they stabilized me on a stretcher and put a flutter valve in my chest to give me oxygen,” Moyer said. “They called a helicopter, and it landed in Agren Park and airlifted me to Harborview.”
Moyer immediately received a surgical operation that inserted titanium into his backbone to stabilize it.
This experience of breaking his back and not being able to move was later a catalyst for the naming of the Backbone Campaign: an organization whose goal is to give strength to those who are politically paralyzed, and who don’t feel they have the power to make change.
Around that time there were many developments taking place around the world that evoked outcry from many liberals throughout the U.S., including the passage of NAFTA and the USA PATRIOT Act, the formation of the World Trade Organization, the election of President George W. Bush, and the first Gulf War.
“We started to have potlucks to talk about what people with so much privilege, time, education and creativity [could do],” Moyer said. “We had an obligation: to whom much is given, much is expected. So we started doing banners over the freeway. Our first one was ‘Oil Man leading us into Disaster.’”
After many actions on the freeways in protest of the Iraq War, Moyer and his colleagues decided to step it up a notch.
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we brought a 70-foot backbone to the Democrats at their National Convention because they don’t seem to be able to stand up to this administration?’ And then we thought about giving ‘Backbone Awards’ to people who stood up,” Moyer said. “It just became this theme that we used.”
Some local artists then carved the first backbone and sketched drawings of people marching with a backbone. The Backbone Campaign was officially created in 2005.
“It became immediately clear that the political parties are not the source of change,” Moyer said. “The values and ideas percolate in a society like a rising tide, and politicians don’t want to get too far ahead or too far behind: they have to be relevant. So as the tide of an idea or value becomes prominent in a society, the politicians, for their own survival, appear to lead. When the people lead, the leaders follow.”
The idea of the people taking charge became a driving force in the campaign. The group used creative and artistic strategies to create social change, giving people a way of expressing their beliefs in a beautiful, satirical manner.
“Creating social movement has really become a role of [the] Backbone Campaign and strengthening the social movement, so it has really compelling messages that are grounded in solid information, solid policy and solid analysis, but not just that: ‘kayactivism’ for instance.”
The campaign uses “kayactivism” to make protests against things like Arctic drilling feel less distant and more immediate.
“We can engage with each other in a beautiful activity and engage with our bodies on water that is inherently dangerous, which creates [a] community between the people participating,” Moyer said. “It creates a David vs Goliath dynamic. It communicates [the] values of standing up for something that’s not for sale — something that’s sacred.”
When asked how his ideal world would look, Moyer sat back to think for a moment and then came forth with an answer that provided an insight into the end objective of the campaign.
“My ultimate goal would be to live in a world where nothing of ultimate importance is for sale, and where people’s journey of life, their creativity, experience of community, connection of place and obligation to future generations are considered sacred,” Moyer said. “I’d love to live in a world where the fundamental ethic is an ethic based on what I believe to be the reality — that we’re all in this together.”
Moyer stressed the fact that people can make a difference if they take charge and join movements. Even the smallest of actions can pool together with others and create revolutions.
“When you can find something that animates their imagination and makes them realize that the status quo is not inevitable, and that actually change is what’s inevitable, and that they can be authors of that change … we are actually very, very powerful.”
Moyer’s reason for fighting for this paradigm is, simply put, to ensure that future generations can enjoy the world of the future the way he has.
“One young person said to me ‘Stop leaving us broken sh*t,’” Moyer said. “I grew up with broken sh*t. You’ve grown up with broken sh*t, “We need to stop leaving future generations broken sh*t.”