Religion and Relationality: Insights from Indigenous Studies

This digital conversation will address difficulties, challenges, and concerns from Indigenous Studies scholars when studying, teaching, and researching in the study of religion.

1. How do we unpack settler colonialism in the teaching spaces regarding the study of religion and Indigenous experiences?
2. How do we unpack spirituality and religion when talking about indigeneity or Indigenous experiences?
3. What does decolonization or indigenization look like in the Religious Studies classroom?
4. How do you engage Indigenous experiences of religion when speaking to various publics? How do we communicate these values to a non-Indigenous public?

This dialogue between scholars at the University of Alberta took place over a period of two weeks in January and February of 2021. Each scholar had forty-eight hours to respond to the prompts and then to their colleague. Responses appear in the order in which they were written and exchanged. For the fifth response, “Teaching Indigenous Experiences,” Gareau and LeBlanc come together to think through what is at stake in the conversation. The authors have supplied bibliographies, featured at the end of each response, for readers who would like to learn more.

by Paul Gareau

My name is Paul L. Gareau and I am a Métis citizen who grew up in a hamlet called Bellevue near Batoche, Saskatchewan. The Métis are a post-contact, Indigenous nation who have a distinct historical, linguistic, cultural, and political identity emergent and situated in the Métis Homeland, located in the Prairie and Parkland areas of what is now called western Canada and north-western United States. Growing up in this space, I felt the burdening silence of settler colonialism that continues to oppress, dispossess, and erase Indigenous peoples, especially through the legacy of systemic racism perpetrated and maintained by religious institutions in Canada and the US. I also recognize significant experiences of kinship that happened around religion, particularly during pilgrimages to the nearby Catholic site called St. Laurent de Grandin. There I experienced the convergence of relational engagement with family and community, with other peoples, with God, and with the Land. Doing pilgrimage to this storied place and sacred site was extremely formative, which drove me to understand the role of religion regarding Métis identity and Indigenous relations.

At university, however, I could not find the Métis experiences of religion anywhere. I could not find it in Anthropology or Cultural Studies, History, or Theology. I was looking for answers in a world that couldn’t recognize Métis sovereignty. So, I gravitated to Religious Studies focusing on Women Studies and Jewish Studies. There, I was able to absorb critical theory to help unpack and resist normative power structures, as well as learn collective and self-determined approaches to socio-political identity. This religious literacy/competency offered a means to recognizing the multivariate perspectives and experiences of people living in diverse, settler colonial countries like Canada and the US by situating religious identity in institutional power and lived experiences (Beaman 2017; Gray-Hildenbrand and King 2019). However, again, this approach falls short of explicating Métis identity with regards to Métis experiences of religion.

It was in Indigenous Studies that I found a disciplinary approach that focuses on self-determination of Indigenous ways of being and knowing. Core concepts like relationality point to complex relations as key suppositions in the way we think and how we do research (Moreton-Robinson 2016), while sovereignty helps affirm the centrality of Indigenous collective, relational engagements in generating knowledge (Andersen 2021; Anderson 2016). This disciplinarity centres Indigenous epistemologies that are land-based, informed by the density of Indigenous languages, operationalized by ceremony and ritual at storied places, reflective of collective nationhood and peoplehood engagements, and representative of multiple truths that are co-constitutive and situated (Million 2015; TallBear 2017). It is from here that I can unpack the Métis experiences of religion reflective of a Métis nationhood that is invested in diplomatic and consensual relations with other peoples (human and more-than-human). Put differently, it is through a relational hermeneutic that we can better understand Indigenous experiences of religion for a more robust religious literacy/competency.

References

Andersen, Chris. 2021. “Peoplehood and the Nation Form: Core Concepts for a Critical Métis Studies.” In A People and a Nation: New Directions in Contemporary Métis Studies, edited by Jennifer Adese and Chris Andersen, 16–37. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Anderson, Kim. 2016. A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood. 2nd ed. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

Beaman, Lori G. 2017. Deep Equality in an Era of Religious Diversity. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Gray‐Hildenbrand, Jenna, and Rebekka King. 2019. “Teaching in Contexts: Designing a Competency-Based Religious Studies Program.” Teaching Theology & Religion 22 (3): 191–204.

Million, Dian. 2015. “Epistemology.” In Native Studies Keywords, edited by Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja, 339–46. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2016. “Relationality: A Key Presupposition of an Indigenous Social Research Paradigm.” In Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, edited by Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien, 69–77. New York: Routledge.

TallBear, Kim. 2017. “Standing with and Speaking as Faith.” In Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, edited by Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien, 78–85. New York: Routledge.

By Jeanine LeBlanc

My name is Jeanine LeBlanc and I am a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. I am a Mi’kmaw e’pit (Mi’kmaw woman) with relations in Mi’kma’ki (Mi’kmaq territory), or what is called Atlantic Canada today. 

I grew up in Manitoba, on the Canadian Prairies, in an evangelical Christian family involved in global movements committed to representing Indigenous experiences of Christianity in ways that better reflected Indigenous ways of being and knowing. My first experiences of Indigenous peoples engaging in religion were complex, filled with frustration about ongoing institutional power rooted in settler-colonialism and the desire to experience religion in ways that reflected their Indigenous identities. Throughout my youth and young adulthood, I witnessed Indigenous peoples engaging religion through building relationships within and outside their nations and peoples while sharing their ways of being and knowing through storied landscapes.

I continue to reconnect with Mi’kmaq experiences, perspectives, and histories, as well as our interpretations of religious engagement rooted in our epistemologies and ontologies, through visiting with relations, both human and more-than-human in Mi’kma’ki. Although I eventually moved away from an investment in religious institutions many years ago, I instead became interested in Mi’kmaq lived experiences of religion, particularly Mi’kmaq women’s relationship with Catholicism through the French Catholic saint, Saint Anne (McGuire 2008). Mi’kmaq people have had a close relationship with Catholicism since the seventeenth century, following French Catholic orders arriving in our lands and territories (Robinson 2003). This led to a long history of engagement with Catholicism through the cult of Saint Anne. Many Mi’kmaq people continue to engage in veneration of Saint Anne through annual summer pilgrimages that gather Mi’kmaq people from across Mi’kma’ki at places that have been sacred to the Mi’kmaq for centuries. They gather to visit with one another, with their ancestors, and move in pilgrimage across the lands and waters of Mi’kma’ki to venerate their ki’ju (grandmother), Saint Anne (Chute 1992; Robinson 2003).

I began my journey through academia as an Indigenous student in the disciplines of History, Anthropology, and Theology. Settler-colonial possessiveness (Moreton-Robinson 2019) over interpretations of Indigenous experiences in all these disciplines, including Indigenous experiences of religion, eventually helped plant me firmly in the discipline of Indigenous Studies. Indigenous Studies disciplinarity became a place to focus on Mi’kmaq lived experiences of religion, one which acknowledges the complexities of Indigenous relationships with religion and affirms Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in their engagement of religious institutions (Andersen 2009). 

References

Andersen, Chris. 2021. “Peoplehood and the Nation Form: Core Concepts for a

Critical Métis Studies.” In A People and a Nation: New Directions in Contemporary Métis Studies, edited by Jennifer Adese and Chris Andersen, 20–43. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Andersen, Chris. 2009. “Critical Indigenous Studies: From Difference to Density” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2): 80–100.

Chute, Janet Elizabeth. 1992. “Ceremony, Social Revitalization and Change: Micmac Leadership and the Annual Festival of St. Anne.” In Papers of the Twenty-Third Algonquian Conference, vol. 23. East Lansing: Michigan State University.

Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. 2017. “Mind, Heart, Hand: Thinking, Feeling, and Doing in Indigenous History Methods.” In Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, edited by Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien, 60-68. New York: Routledge.

McGuire, Meredith. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2016. “Relationality: A Key Presupposition of an Indigenous Social Research Paradigm.” In Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, edited by Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien, 69–77. New York: Routledge.

 ———. 2019. “Engaging the White Possessive.” Kalfou 6 (1): 68–72. https://doi.org/10.15367/kf.v6i1.231.

Robinson, Angela. 2003. Ta’n Teli-ktlams†tasit (Ways of Believing): Mi’kmaw Religion in Eskasoni. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada. Wallis and Wallis, 1955.

by Paul Gareau

When discussing Indigenous experiences of religion, we will often centre our teaching and scholarship on spirituality as the most effective way to describe and understand Indigenous peoples’ actions, beliefs, and worldview(s); i.e., spiritual but not religious. This, however, is a little misleading. The use of the binary terms of religion and spirituality for describing Indigenous peoples’ experiences is not the issue, but the conceptual baggage that comes with its definitions.

David Delgado Shorter (2016) presents an effective analysis and genealogy of why we must stop using spirituality when describing Indigenous experiences, and ways of being and knowing. He argues that spirituality suffers conceptual slippage with its etymological and ontological meaning built on a history of binary thinking that dominates Western epistemology. This involves the following key differentiated and hierarchical binaries: sacred/profane, metaphysical/physical, spirit/matter, mind/body, reason/faith, objectivity/subjectivity, sciences of the mind/natural sciences, and ethical religion/natural religion. By this logic, Indigenous peoples across the globe are interpreted as individuals without souls or reason, thus transformed into objects of study or people to exploit because, inherently, they are “incapable of knowing themselves” (Shorter, 436). This has justified a long history of empire building and institutional colonialism based in Western epistemology and worldview that continues to impact Indigenous peoples today. Shorter concludes, “We must ask how the use of ‘spirituality’ continues the logic of settler colonialism that insists on defining indigenous people as both inferior and premodern, and inevitably concludes that indigenous cultures have no future other than assimilation, a genteel version of cultural elimination” (Shorter, 440). The deployment of power/knowledge in generating and upholding settler colonial values and White supremacy must be unpacked and resisted.

Shorter’s (2016, 433) response to this conceptual slippage is to argue for an ontological shift towards Indigenous intersubjectivity “replacing the adjective ‘spiritual’ with the word ‘related’ in describing indigenous world views.” This brings our analysis of Indigenous experiences of religion back to the core concept of relationality. We need to resist unitive definitions and understandings of religion/spirituality by centering Indigenous relations as co-constitutive and situated, and affirm socio-political self-determination of different nations/peoples’ relations (human and more-than-human). We can instead focus on Indigenous lifeways as a means to explicating the religio-spiritual nature of nation-to-nation relational engagement. In this way, John Grim (2008, 99–100) explains the experiential production/generation of Indigenous knowledge as traditional (intergenerational transmission), empirical (based on individual experiences), and revelatory (knowledge and insight drawn from human and more-than-human relations). We can also consider Chris Andersen’s concept of density (2009) in order to move away from seeing Indigenous epistemologies as inherently different or differentiated from Western values and worldview, but as having the capacity to engage with and resist settler colonial hegemony and focus on Indigenous flourishing. Indigenous peoples have a fundamental capacity of producing/generating knowledge that represents robust epistemologies based on situated ontologies, strong governance structures as nations/peoples, and healthy societies framed within a “spiritual” engagement.

Ultimately, the problem isn’t adapting new terms and concepts to move Indigenous experiences away from the categories of religion and spirituality. The main goal is to resist unitive definitions of these terms based on settler colonial values, and focus on how Indigenous peoples deploy relational values using these concepts. Instead of framing Indigenous religions as syncretic or hybrid (i.e., between two different worlds), we can focus on the reifying force and legacy of settler colonialism on forming institutional religion and informing spiritual engagement. We can see how Indigenous peoples center relationality when engaging institutional religion to make it their own relations, or how “traditionalism” as spirituality reflects more easily language and concepts of strong relations between nations/peoples (human and more-than-human). We must not deny Indigenous use of religion and spirituality, but reflect on how relationality informs their definitions.

References

Andersen, Chris. 2009. “Critical Indigenous Studies: From Difference to Density.” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2): 80–100.

Grim, John. 2008. “Indigenous Lifeways and Knowing the World.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, edited by Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson, 87–107. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Shorter, David Delgado. 2016. “Spirituality.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, 433–52. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

by Jeanine LeBlanc

When we want to understand Indigenous perspectives and actions, we must first acknowledge Indigenous understandings of the world. As a Mi’kmaw scholar invested in Indigenous interpretations of different experiences of religion, I see the value in how Shorter problematizes the term spirituality. But, like Paul wrote above, we need to understand Indigenous peoples’ operationalization of the terms religion and spirituality in order to affirm relationality and self-determination. Relationality as a concept and ethos of relations, helps challenge the unitive definitions of Cartesian rationalism and individualism. As Shorter (2016, 436) concludes, challenging Descartes’ bias towards intellectuality as the basis for being, “We relate, therefore we are.” Indigenous relational interpretations of religion and spirituality can be further explained by looking at the work of Indigenous scholars, Kim TallBear and Rob Innes.

When considering Indigenous experiences of religion, we often focus on settler-colonial interpretations of Indigenous actions rooted in assimilation. The resulting assumptions ignore the epistemological and ontological basis for Indigenous lived experiences grounded in relationality. Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate scholar, Kim TallBear (2017, 81), points to the necessity of privileging “situated knowledges”, or knowledges that emerge from the experiences of Indigenous peoples, when researching with Indigenous communities. She asserts that, Indigenous scholars strengthen research when we account for knowledges arising from the lived experiences and interpretations of Indigenous peoples. As Indigenous scholars who resist “studying” our people and communities, we inhabit and think with Indigenous lands and territories, maintain relations with humans and more-than-humans, and engage in the flourishing of Indigenous life, its nationhood and peoplehood political relations. Challenging settler colonial explanations of Indigenous use of terms like religion and spirituality must therefore be centered in Indigenous interpretations of these terms, which emerge from relational ways of being and knowing.

Plains Cree scholar Rob Innes presents a clear affirmation of how situated knowledge generation through storytelling determines Indigenous understandings of identity, challenging settler-colonial interpretations. He illustrates how Indigenous governance is guided by values and ethics reinforcing kinship connections embedded in epistemological and ontological approaches to individual and collective identity found in traditional stories. This focus on relationality challenges the artificiality of the settler-colonial state’s legal definition and regulation of indigeneity. Indigenous interpretations of identity rooted in relations take precedence over imposed legal definitions (Innes, 7). Innes’ response to settler-colonial assumptions about Indigenous identity can help us further understand how relationality guides Indigenous actions with other settler-colonial institutions like religious institutions. Instead of interpreting Indigenous engagement with religion and its institutions through a settler-colonial lens of assimilation, we can centre Indigenous interpretations of their experiences of religion, and its related terminology, in our analysis.

TallBear and Innes point to Shorter’s conclusion that an Indigenous epistemological framework of relationality deconstructs Cartesian rationalism and individualism by asserting that relations are the basis for Indigenous actions, interpretations, and identity, both collective and individual. “We relate” through the generation of “situated knowledges” emerging from our relations with humans and more-than-humans in our lands and storied places. “We relate” through teaching and generating scholarship together with our communities as Indigenous scholars who care for and maintain their relations with humans and more-than-humans (TallBear 2017). And because “we relate” in ways that acknowledge and strengthen kinship connections, with humans and more-than-humans, “we are” (Innes 2013). This means we must rely on Indigenous interpretations of religion and spirituality, and its related terms emerging from our collective relations in our specific lands and territories. We must acknowledge that Indigenous teaching and scholarship also proceed from the maintenance of our relations with humans and more-than-humans—land, waters, ancestors, saints, God, and others, and that our individual and collective identities result from relating.

References

Innes, Robert Alexander. 2013. Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Contemporary Kinship and Cowessess First Nation. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Shorter, David Delgado. 2016. “Spirituality.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, 433–52. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

TallBear, Kim. 2017. “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry.” In Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, edited by Chris Andersen and Jean O’Brien, 78–85. New York, NY: Routledge.

by Paul Gareau and Jeanine LeBlanc

The teaching and research of religion must be equitable, inclusive, and diverse in terms of epistemology, ontologies, and praxis; i.e., topics, analysis, and dissemination. But with Indigenous ways of being and knowing, decolonization and indigenization are crucial in generating affective engagement. To operationalize these values for institutional change, we can assert the adage nothing about us without us. However, this is a complicated process unpacking the legacy and impact of settler colonialism, and resisting and dismantling structural racism.

Indigenous perspectives must be centered when considering decolonizing settler colonial institutions in order to challenge investment in reifying settler colonial values. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012, 9) point to how specific actions designated as decolonial within institutions are actually “settler moves to innocence.” What this means is that these empty attempts to decolonize instead participate in the ongoing marginalization of Indigenous peoples whose perspectives, experiences, and histories are not considered in the process. White possessiveness over land and relations, therefore, drive these programmatic attempts at decolonization and determine its scope, ultimately reflecting a lack of relations. There is the appearance of relating, but no reciprocal relations. Indigenous responses to decolonization rooted in incommensurability, or the refusal to be measured by the same standard as others, challenge this “set of evasions” embedded in settler colonial decolonization based on sameness (2012, 1). Tuck and Yang conclude, “To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples” (2012, 36). Where there is no room for “land back” in these decolonization attempts, Indigenous responses are to decenter settler naturalization and stability, and focus on Indigenous relational futurities.

In response to Tuck and Yang’s notion of an ethic of incommensurability and Indigenous sovereignty, indigenization becomes a key approach to generating social and institutional change. Adam Gaudry and Danielle Lorenz (2018) outline how Canadian universities are engaging processes of decolonization and indigenization with varying degrees of success. They conclude with two suggestions for policy and praxis (224–25). The first is treaty-based decolonial indigenization that asserts a nation-to-nation model for operationalizing indigenization, like a dual-university model that relinquishes space for administrative autonomy regarding Indigenous scholars and staff over decision making, funding, and academic standards. The second is a resurgence-based decolonial indigenization that seeks to rebuild and strengthen Indigenous cultures, knowledges, and governance done with a nationhood/peoplehood model centring on-the-land and community-based learning and dissemination. The adage becomes clearer: nothing about us without us. But this is not an exclusivist, sociopolitical moralization replicating current structural issues. As Kim TallBear (2019, 38) affirms, “Making or creating kin can call non-Indigenous people (including those who do not fit well into the “settler” category) to be more accountable to Indigenous lifeways long constituted in intimate relation with this place.” Therefore, Indigenization in an ethos of incommensurability is always oriented towards social and political relations between kin, i.e., self-determined collective peoples (human and more-than-human), as well as non-Indigenous people and communities.

Indigenous experiences of religion are centrally framed by an ethos of relationality. Therefore, our work in understanding and engaging the study of religion in our classrooms and in the broader public should adhere to this framework. Here are some of our reflections on how to communicate and engage Indigenous experiences of religion:   

1. Centering Relationality: In our Thinking, Teaching, Research, and Writing on Religion

1.1. Relational Epistemology: How do you see the world? What is influencing your understanding of the world? What histories do you know and care about that shape your worldview? How does your community shape the way you see the world? How do you interpret the realities and experiences of other people based on these understandings? 
1.2. Indigenous Ways of Thinking and Knowing: Focusing on and relinquishing space for Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies; Indigenous scholars and scholarship; community knowledges and experiences (i.e., land-based learning).
1.3. Indigenous Sovereignties: Focus on Indigenous self-determination, nationhood/peoplehood, and kinship relations rather than reifying the power and interpretations of settler institutions in discussions on religion in our classes and public spaces.
1.4. Situated Thinking and Being: Focusing on multiple approaches to thinking, research, and dissemination that includes multidisciplinary approaches as well as arts-based research and art creation.
1.5. Co-Constituted Relations: Deploying decolonization and indigenization in how we centre Indigenous perspectives and experiences of religion in our classrooms and in public.

 
3. “The Visiting Way” (Gaudet 2019): Sharing Spaces for Knowing and Relating to Each Other

Conclusion

Teaching religion in public necessitates strong, reciprocal, and consensual relations. Indigenous knowledge, peoples, and relations cannot be possessed. Relations are not programmatic; you need to invest in Indigenous communities and see them as self-determined. Teaching Indigenous experiences of religion in public is about decentering settler colonialism and focusing on relationality, sovereignty, and the flourishing of Indigenous nations and peoples, human and more-than-human.

References

Gaudet, Janice Cindy. 2019. “Keeoukaywin: The Visiting Way – Fostering an Indigenous Research Methodology.” Aboriginal Policy Studies 7 (2): 47–64. https://doi.org/10.5663/aps.v7i2.29336.

Gaudry, Adam, and Danielle Lorenz. 2018. “Indigenization as Inclusion, Reconciliation, and Decolonization: Navigating the Different Visions for Indigenizing the Canadian Academy.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 14 (3): 218–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180118785382.

TallBear, Kim. 2019. “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” Kalfou 6 (1): 24–41.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40.

Paul L. Gareau is Métis and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Grounded in Métis Studies and Indigenous Studies as well as Religious Studies, Gareau’s work centres on theory and methodology around relationality, gender, Indigenous epistemologies, land and place, and sovereignty/peoplehood. Publications include:

Gareau, Paul L. 2018. “Occupying the Margins of Society: Operationalizing Minority Identity Politics among Youth within the Canadian Catholic New Evangelization.” In The Changing Faces of Catholicism: National Processes and Central, Local, and Institutional Strategies, edited by Solange Lefebvre and Alfonso Pérez-Agote, 9:109–28. Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion. Leiden; Boston: Brill.

———. 2020. “Army of Mary: Quebec Nationalism and Catholic Heterodoxy.” In The Mystical Geography of Quebec: Catholic Schisms and New Religious Movements, edited by Susan J. Palmer, Martin Geoffroy, and Paul L. Gareau, 55–84. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.

———. 2021. “Mary and the Métis: Religion as a Site for New Insight in Métis Studies.” In A People and a Nation: New Directions in Contemporary Métis Studies, edited by Jennifer Adese and Chris Andersen, 188–212. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Jeanine LeBlanc is Mi’kmaw and a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Her research explores Mi’kmaw women’s lived experiences of religion, Indigenous women’s engagement with religion, and Indigenous feminisms. Publications include:

Gareau, Paul L., and Jeanine LeBlanc. Forthcoming. “Pilgrimage as Peoplehood: Indigenous Relations and Self-Determination at Places of Catholic Pilgrimage in Mi’kma’ki and the Métis Homeland.” Material Religion 17 (5): 1–18.

LeBlanc, Jeanine. (forthcoming, Spring 2021). “Indigenous Feminisms: Disrupting Settler-Colonial Narratives by Centering Indigenous Women’s Thought and Experiences.” Verges: Germanic and Slavic Studies in Review.

LeBlanc, Jeanine, and Paul L. Gareau. Forthcoming. “Indigenous Pilgrimage as Relations of Peoples and Place.” In Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes, edited by Molly Bassett and Natalie Avalos, 1–4. Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publisher.