This talk traces a genealogy of a familiar state practice – the naturalization ceremony - through an unexpected site: the Indian reservation. Prof. Somerville explores a ritual that is not typically considered part of U.S. naturalization history, but was carried out by federal officials in the early twentieth century to confer citizenship on American Indians under the Dawes Act. Drawing on archival materials, she contextualizes these ceremonies within the longer history of U.S. policies and practices for producing new citizens. In stark and startling terms, these materials demonstrate the federal state’s fantasy that naturalization could dramatize and install settler norms of race, sexuality, and gender among American Indians. But, in practice, other things could happen – and often did.