Land Acknowledgments are a practice used in colonized spaces where those gathered acknowledge that as beneficiaries of colonization, they bear the responsibility to at the very least raise awareness of the imperialist origins of that particular colonized space, and purposefully name those who were and still are occupants of that land before colonization.

Since Interlude is an online educational venture there is not one single location to acknowledge, however, due to our reliance on the Internet Interlude does indeed have a physical presence. The physical infrastructure of the Internet is vast and uses many resources. It has a physical footprint comprising server farms, satellites, power plants, parts manufacturers, and precious metal mines, to name a few. Aside from the ecological footprint, this entire system is maintained by people primarily existing in exploitative capitalist monetary systems.

Here at Interlude, we would like to name this complex reality, admit that we are active beneficiaries of this ecologically harmful and exploitative system, and acknowledge that we do not have good answers. Part of the motivation for this venture was economic pressure and the simplest way to address that for us is to rely primarily on the Internet. This puts us in a complex position of being complicit in ecologically harmful and economically exploitative systems while also being economically exploited by capitalist interests.

So how do we navigate this complexity? Interlude’s primary goal is to teach the joy of music, and though the Western academy often presents music as an insular and separate practice, music is deeply connected to nature, culture, sociology, history, and politics. This is how we intend to address the complexity and hypocrisy of our situation.

1. Enter into a non-hierarchical student-teacher relationship that focuses on relational learning instead of an access-to-expertise-based pedagogy.

2. Work towards an educational pedagogy that acknowledges and explores how music shapes culture, influences politics, is informed by the sciences, and is created with instruments built from natural resources.

3. Focus both on economic and access-based accessibility needs. Acknowledging that both physical and mental disabilities affect people's abilities to earn money and study music.

4. Acknowledge and explore the historical and cultural histories and influences within the music we teach in order to work towards an anti-racist pedagogy that seeks to understand the complexities of the cross-cultural influences that have appeared in music often as a result of colonialist power structures.

5. Lastly, Interlude is currently run by Queer Arab-American second-generation immigrants who hold embodied knowledge of the intergenerational trauma caused by colonization and imperialism. We view it as our duty to acknowledge that our embodied and lived experience is as important as our academic training and that the only way for us to be effective teachers is to hold space for both what we study academically and the knowledge that we hold deep within us.

Before the European colonization of the West beginning in the late 15th century, the land where Interlude’s current staff resides was stewarded by the Wabanaki (Dawnland Confederacy), N’dakina (Abenaki / Abénaquis), and Mohican peoples, who have faced and still experience active efforts of genocide and cultural erasure. We at Interlude, as Palestinian-Americans of Syrian and European descent stand in solidarity with all the aboriginal peoples in the Americas and across the world. Your liberation is our liberation.

It is our hope that in the future music will be made from instruments built with love and gratitude for the planet from which the material came. That music will be performed as a healing modality and a joyous sharing of cultural knowledge. That music education would simply be education because the audience and musicians are not, and have never been separate entities. This is the futurity we at Interlude are actively working to embody.