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LEIF ENGER: Kit Morgan is visibly nervous as he enters the manager's office. He's been through these interviews before. The manager, acting none too friendly, stands up behind his desk. They shake hands and sit. The questions begin.

SERGEANT: How did you learn about the job?

MORGAN: I attended school at the Bemidji vocational for two years, got a carpentry degree.

SERGEANT: Are you willing to travel?

MORGAN: Yeah.

SERGEANT: As a job requirement?

MORGAN: Yes.

LEIF ENGER: It's almost like a real job interview, only the job isn't real, the manager is actually a teacher, and afterwards, Morgan will get some pointers that will make his next practice interview go a bit smoother. Irv Sergeant is a member of the White Earth Chippewa band and head of the Bemidji Indian employment council, which has sponsored classes like this one for the past five years.

SERGEANT: There were a lot of Indian people that wanted jobs, but weren't really prepared to go out. The people that we deal with here in our classroom are those that aren't quite as polished and need some skills in terms of interviewing, motivation, assertiveness, those sorts of things.

LEIF ENGER: The employment council was formed in the summer of '85 after Leech Lake Reservation leader Hartley White asked city and County leaders why more Indians weren't working in Bemidji. Indians make up 10% of the population here, but 50% of those are unemployed.

Quentin White, a class member from Red Lake, says his best success at finding work in the past came when he got white friends to go to employers and vouch for him.

QUENTIN: They would rather listen to them rather than have me come in there and talk to them because I'm Indian, I guess, because they would rather have a white person come and talk for an Indian rather than have the Indian come in there, and they wouldn't really listen to the Indian if I come in there myself is the way I feel.

LEIF ENGER: The council has so far placed about 50 Indians in full-time permanent jobs and another 150 in part time or seasonal work. Stories like Quentin White's are common, but Irv Sergeant says the reason so many Indians still aren't working goes beyond discrimination.

SERGEANT: There's not that much of an opportunity for anybody, white or Indian people. You see, the competition for jobs is just tremendous. We had a case here a couple of years ago when the city hired two people, and I think they had something like 350 applicants for those two jobs. In some cases, somebody's almost going to have to say I am going to hire an American-Indian for Indians to be hired.

[ENGINE RUNNING]

LEIF ENGER: At the Minnesota Department of Transportation district headquarters, a frontend loader scoops gravel into the back of a big orange dump truck. The driver of the truck is Indian, so are 10 other local MnDOT workers and the agency is actively recruiting more. District engineer Bob Wolf says growing up on the edge of the Leech Lake Reservation gave him a firsthand look at job discrimination.

BOB WOLF: For some reason, something happened. After I got out of high school, there were opportunities that were open to me that weren't to some of my friends, and they didn't really seem to end up getting a full-time job or, in some cases, not even working, going on welfare. It was kind of a quiet prejudice that wasn't mean towards anyone, but it's just like you didn't exist, that there weren't Indian people around.

LEIF ENGER: That quiet prejudice is what Wolf and others are trying to work against in Bemidji. It's a difficult battle. Mark [? Farabee, ?] who places low-income clients in temporary jobs through the rural Minnesota Concentrated Employment Program, or CEP, says Indians born into families of third or fourth-generation poverty often have such low expectations that they don't even recognize racism when they see it.

MARK: I think some of these folks do come from an area where it's accepted that they're going to be not as employable. They may not even know or understand that they're being discriminated against. I believe that that's a part of the problem.

LEIF ENGER: But if progress has been slow, local leaders say, at least there's been progress. Getting more Indians into the workplace has turned out to be an incremental process, with lots of part time and low pay far. Across town from the Indian employment council, Irv Sergeant's brother Earl, who works at the State Indian Affairs Office, says you take what you can get and keep working for more.

EARL: It's awful nice to walk into a store and, in some of the stores, not all of them, and see an Indian, even though it's bagging up groceries, or stocking shelves, or working at a checkout counter, or something of that nature. I'll tell you, it's pretty darn nice, but we still don't see it in the banks and loan institutions here.

We don't see it in a lot of places. It's slow. It's coming. We got our foot in the door, but it's a long, long ways to get it where there's equal opportunity.

LEIF ENGER: Indian Affairs employee, Earl Sergeant. This is Leif Enger.