Indian race - and consequently, anti-Indian racism - is invisible in our contemporary national consciousness. The invisibility is a product of a very specific American story about Indians disappearing via extinction, genocide, removal, or absorption, a story that has been shaped and reinforced by the legal rules constructing Indian racial identity. For example, unlike the rule of hypodescent, which ensured an ever-increasing black population and facilitated the exploitation of black labor, Indian race has been defined according to minimum blood quantum and cultural performance requirements, which ensured that Indians would eventually die out and facilitated the appropriation of Indian land. Despite this invisibility, Indian race is made salient today in specific local contexts, such as reservation border communities and cities with significant Indian populations, where white-Indian is the defining racial hierarchy. In these communities, Indian people regularly experience race-based stereotyping, discrimination, hate crimes, police profiling, and disproportionate incarceration. These experiences, however, remain largely unseen and certainly under-theorized. This invisibility is amplified by the doctrinal and theoretical separation between Indian law and civil rights law. These two areas of law are taught separately in law schools and treated separately by courts. At times, they are explicitly juxtaposed against each other, such that political is understood to mean non-racial. Born out of a need to protect Indian programs from encroachment by colorblind, anti-affirmative action jurisprudence, the "political, not racial" rule, first enunciated in Morton v. Mancari, has developed into a reflexive disavowal of race on the part of Indian advocates -- a move which reinforces a reductionist conception of race, forces Indian people to choose between racial and political identities, and weakens the struggle against anti-Indian racism in particular and racism generally. At the same time, discussions of race and racism often fail to fully account for the political dimension of Indian identity and the importance of tribal sovereignty to Indian people. Federal Indian law, which recognizes and protects tribal political rights, must not be treated as separate and antithetical to civil rights. Instead, race theorists must understand how Indian law protects Indians from the effects of racism. Incorporation for Indian people has historically meant invisibility and extinction, and the political rights of tribal governments have enabled Indian people to preserve cultural distinctiveness. While race theorists have questioned the value and voluntariness of assimilation, integration, and incorporation for other minority groups, Indian law is the only area of legal doctrine that explicitly disavows assimilation and facilitates separateness for people of color in the United State, and it is thus an important part of any discussion about race in this country. Most Indian people are simultaneously members of sovereign nations and racialized as subordinate within the domestic racial order, and theory should reflect this. This paper thus argues against the disaggregation of Indian race and tribal political rights and attempts to formulate an analysis that links the two. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]