Roxanne Hall and company drove across Canada in the summer of 2005 to promote their CD Roxanne Hall and Avenue Earth. What was apparent to her on this trip, similar to one she made over twenty years ago, was the bourgeoning of stripmalls and the deforestation achieved primarily by an American company called Weyerhaeuser. She was interviewed by Susan Dubrofsky. Roxanne can be contacted at www.avenueearth.com

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Q: Where do you come from?

A: I come from a French-Canadian mother and an English father who moved out west to Kamloops from St. Boniface. I have four brothers and one sister. My father was very musical and I think that’s where I got my music. My dad worked in radio and then became an engineer on the railroads. My mother was head of the ultrasound department of the hospital and then she became the president of the Health Board. My father would play piano and bagpipe music, incredibly loud. He sang lots of old airforce songs as he had been in the airforce, flying planes. That was hard for him to give that up, he was never the same after that. Being in a big family, I found it hard to get my point across, so when I learned to play guitar I would go sit in my room and write down the things I thought.

Q: What are your roots or influences in your music?

A: My sister was a big influence. She is seven years older and she played a lot of guitar. She played Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Cat Stevens. My brothers were listening to Nazareth, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple. I liked belting out the rock songs, but my writing came from my sister’s influence and folk singers.

Q: You do have a folk sound.

A: I call it Earth Rock because when people ask me what genre it is, I don’t really know what to say. It’s not really folk and not really rock. I have fans from two to eighty. I have been in the music business for thirty years and I have been writing songs for the same time and it seems to be for everyone.

Roxanne Hall

Q: You have one song, called She’s a Size Ten. Where did that come from?

A: That came from my good friend, Robin Littlejohns, who passed away about five years ago. We were standing in a grocery store lineup and she looked at the magazines and said, Roxanne, where are all the women who look like me? And I thought, yeah, where are they? Why aren’t we all on the covers of these magazines so that we feel that we fit in, that we are okay. I feel for women because we are shown these perfect images of airbrushed beauties and I thought it would be great if we could have all shapes and sizes on the covers of these magazines.

Q: The other song, I am What I Am, where did that come from?

A: That came from different managers that I’ve had in my life who said to me, Okay Roxanne, just do your hair, comb your hair, wear this, if you just did this, dyed your hair, you could make it, can’t you just do this for this company even if you don’t agree with what they do, you could just sell out a little bit, and I thought, No, I am what I am what I am. We are all who we are.

Q: What and where do you want to go with your music?

A: I’m happy right now getting the music out there and having people listen. Sometimes I say, I’m giving this up, I don’t want to do this anymore, I’m not making any money, I’m not getting ahead and then someone comes up and says, Thank you so much for your cd, it helped me a lot get through this hard time in my life. It happens at the right moment, just when I am thinking, I can’t take this business anymore. It’s such a cutthroat business. I would like to get my message out, be who you are, be happy with who you are, shine as bright as you can. Don’t let people diminish your shine. Shine, whether its five watts or hundred watts, shine as bright as you can.

I believe that love is the power of the universe. We can wield it. In my song Love is What We Need to Save Our World, I say, be all the love that you are. I do believe we are sisters and brothers, everyone. I can’t understand why it’s not citizens of planet earth, why there are borders, why people can’t go where they want to go, do what they want to do. It astounds me at the lack of love in this world.

Q: On this album, you are playing with two other musicians, Who are they?

A: Saul Rubinson and Eli Rubinson. They were raised in the middle of nowhere, up Dead Man Valley. Their parents were pioneers who built a house out of nothing, out of the forest. They had no water, no electricity and they had to haul water from the creek at a young age. Then they started an organic farm. This is Eli’s second summer off the farm - they have never been off the farm. We have been playing together for about a year and decided to do this road trip.

Q: What is this road trip?

A: It’s a promotional trip across Canada: We stopped at about three hundred radio stations, delivering our CD. I called first on my cell phone and then we’d stop by and see the music director. I wanted to know our CD got into someone’s hands. One of the things that was disturbing to me as we drove across Canada, is that it’s become one big strip mall. Everything looked the same to me, the MacDonalds, the Wallmart, the Burgher King, the Tim Horton, it went on and on and it never ended. I would think, we’ll get to this next city and it won’t look like that. But it’s all like that, except in places where they keep some heritage, Montreal, Fredriction, Moncton, places in the east where you can get away from the stripmalls, but the stripmalls are still there. Most of these businesses are American corporations and they moved in and taken over. I’ve seen this happen in Kamloops, where downtown is dead and the new city up the hill is all Wallmart and the other businesses I mentioned and East Side Mario’s. I did Canada twenty years ago and it wasn’t like that. And the dams, that was another thing that disturbed me, the waters, I think of water as the mother’s blood and the water doesn’t move. If we did that to a person, put dams in a person, what would happen? Would their heart explode? We’ve poisoned her. Every beautiful place we went to, there would be this pulp mill. Right in the middle of the city. With people around it. It wasn’t until I got to Newfoundland, that I thought, this is okay. There were small businesses. I spoke to a man who lived there and he said, you are just not seeing it, Roxanne. You don’t see that they have taken all the trees, and there is mining because of the highway, one highway through Newfoundland. I thought there were no corporations there but once again, I was being naïve.

Back home, when Weyerhaeuser came, because the mill was unsafe for the States, they decided to set it up in Kamloops. Right at the meeting of two waters. We have two rivers that meet and they set up this pulp mill. Before I left for this road trip, I found out that our esteemed city council had set up a toxic waste incinerator upriver with the pulp mill downriver.

Boreal Forest Photo Credit: Garth Lenz	Saskatchewan Photo Credit: Garth Lenz	Prince Albert Photo Credit: Rupert Eastman

Q: How has that affected you in Kamloops?

A: They built a forty million dollar water treatment plant and said, aren’t we great. I found out why. They are burning toxic waste upriver. I noticed that three weeks away from home, my ears unplugged. I know that the rate of respiratory problems, asthma and other conditions, have increased in the last year. The city council okayed to double Weyerhaeuser emissions last year and they never told us. Weyerhaeuser is an American Pulp and Paper Mill. They bleach and burn railroad ties. The summer of the fires, about two years ago, they figured that was a good time to do it, since the sky was already full of smoke, we wouldn’t notice.

Weyerhaeuser is an American multi-national corporation. I’ve seen Weyerhaeuserr as far as Ontario. Even in Moncton, there was Weyerhaeuser, it stretches. I don’t see why we haven’t run out of trees. I don’t see why we don’t use hemp for toilet paper

Q: What is your favorite track on this album?

A: I Am What I am, because it’s a song for everybody, everyone can sing that song. You don’t have to fit in a mold.

Q: The song, What Have We done, what is that about?

A: Last year, I went up to the center of the universe and stayed alone in a cabin for five days. I was irritated about cellphones. Cellphones are used so readily when billions of microwaves go into your head when you talk on a cell phone. After two minutes on a cellphone, the blood brain barrier starts to leak. They haven’t done enough studies to okay this. Every kid, every teen has a cell phone. People driving talking on cell phones. People get killed. Now they are talking about having laptops and movies in your car. I think it’s a fear factor, they want to keep us afraid.

Q: You said you gave this song a different musical beat.

A: I count, ONE, two, three, four, five, six. I see people around the world, with their drums, their different shoes, their different floors, and pounding their drum, their feet on the first beat. The whole world on that one beat. It’s six eight time.

Q: Is there anything else you want to say?

A: I think we are love, but there is no way I can like everyone.

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As a result of this interview with Roxanne, I found the Rainforest Action Network and the following is only a fraction of the information from the Rainforest Action Network ( http://ran.org) who “work to protect the Earth's rainforests and support the rights of their inhabitants through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action”.

Weyerhaeuser, a $19 billion company, is one of the world's most destructive logging company from North America to the Pacific Rim. In Canada, since 1965, they have renewable licenses to more that 14 million hectares of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and New Brunswick. One third of their timber comes from Canada and turned mainly into grocery bags exported to the United States.

The Canadian boreal forests, from Ontario to the Rocky Mountains, make up 25 percent of the world's original forest and is home not only to birds, caribou, wolves, moose and lynx but to many First Nations. The Canadian boreal not only play a crucial role in offsetting the effects of climate destabilization but provide the necessary conversion of carbon dioxide to oxygen. Canada ’s boreal region contains the bulk of Weyerhaeuser’s Canadian operations.

Over the years, there have been numerous actions directed against logging companies and as recently as February 2006:

Grassy Narrows, Ontario - The Grassy Narrows First Nation today sent letters warning the chief executives of Weyerhaeuser (NYSE: WY) and Abitibi-Consolidated to “immediately cease and desist from all logging and industrial resource extraction on our territory” or face a “fierce international campaign”.
 
The letter follows a decade of failed negotiations, lawsuits, environmental assessment requests, public protests, and a 3-year logging blockade. The letter asserts that decades of unsustainable logging has “poisoned our waters with mercury and other toxins, nearly eliminated our ability to practice our way of life, and robbed us of economic opportunities.”  
 
The letter includes an SOS to the international environmental and human rights community to stand with Grassy Narrows in their demands and expand the struggle in the woods, in the streets and in the market place.
 
For more information visit FriendsofGrassyNarrows.com or WakeUpWeyco.com.

Again, this is the tip of an iceberg about deforestation, rainforest destruction and greedy company practices not only in Canada, but throughout the world.