This project links cultural and intellectual history, Indigenous studies, narrative studies, and the history of science to investigate the influence of non-state people on the state. It focuses on narratives of transformation: stories of self-alteration, reciprocity, and borderless travel developed as a survival strategy by colonized people facing the vectors of epidemic pathogens and state erasure, which resulted in the critique of race. Working with the Indigenous people of British Columbia and with archives and objects from New York to Berlin, this project reconnects knowledge to its origins and traces its global propagation.Globalization is thus seen as a narrative process of transmission and reception that joins and transforms intellectual ecosystems.