PROVIDENCE -- Every morning Michael Bliss dresses for work: slacks, print shirt, hawk feathers.
He ties the feathers to a braid at the back of his head, shaved except for a black Mohawk band. When he walks, the feathers flutter behind him. Sometimes he wears a bone choker, as his ancestors did to protect against colonists' cutting their throats.
"The knife hit the bone," he explains.
The talismans bind the 43-year-old Narragansett to his Indian past -- and give him strength for a modern battle, as a job counselor with the Rhode Island Indian Council.
Bliss, once an amateur boxer, now fights to get Indians jobs, apartments they can afford, or money for school.
"If you're a Blackfoot, or a Narragansett or a Crow, I consider you a part of me," he says. "Your ancestors and my ancestors went through the same thing."
The clients who push through the council's massive oak doors at 807 Broad St. are among the city's poorest people. Those with jobs typically make as little as $15,000 a year, according to the council's executive director, Darrell Waldron. Many are unemployed.
"They don't have new cars -- they don't have cars at all," Waldron says. "They don't have phones. We're seeing Indians in their 30s and 40s that are testing at an eighth-grade level."
It's a stressful job, Bliss says. But he's upbeat with his clients.
A teetotaler and a nonsmoker and nonstop talker, Bliss is part counselor, part big brother -- and part evangelist. "If you get on the right path," he tells them, "I'll get on it with you."
BLISS, whose Indian name is Red Hawk, helps about 75 Indians look for work each year. One is Terrence Frye, a 19-year-old Narragansett.
They went together last summer to NetWORKri, a Providence employment agency. After some small talk, caseworker Jan Campbell asked Frye a routine question: "Do you have any future court dates that could keep you from working?"
"He's a good guy," Bliss said. "He doesn't have a record."
Frye, in fact, was a promising applicant. A recent Hope High School graduate, the son of a Providence firefighter, he had a driver's license and lived at home.
But without much experience, he qualified for few positions. Campbell scrolled through the descriptions on her monitor: Heavy lifting. Third shift. Fork-lift experience.
Eventually, Frye got a job stocking a Wal-Mart warehouse for $8.25 an hour. He's still working there, and recently got a raise. Bliss counts him as a success story.
Not everybody fares as well. "It's tough for my people to get jobs," he says.
He ticks through the problems: "A drug test kills my people because a lot of them smoke marijuana. Alcoholism is bad, too. On Friday, they get their paycheck and then they party. On Monday they don't go to work."
If they don't have a diploma, hospitals won't hire them, he says. A criminal record? They can't get in the door of big companies like Home Depot or Lowe's.
"City Indians have it tough," he says.
Take Dion Robinson, says Bliss. The 18-year-old Narragansett, who lived in a housing project on Dresser Street, he had clashed with the police a few times.
But he dreamed of going to college. For three months, Robinson scrubbed floors and cut the grass at the Indian Council. Upstairs, at Career Tracks, he worked at getting a high school diploma.
Then, on a hot July night last year, he yelled at someone in a red Jeep Cherokee with tinted windows. Someone in the Jeep pulled a gun and shot Dion in the torso. He collapsed inside the house on Harold Street where he'd been visiting friends and relatives, and was pronounced dead at Rhode Island Hospital.
Police have yet to find Dion Robinson's killer.
"NOBODY THINKS of urban-based Indians," says Waldron, a Wampanoag and Narragansett who grew up in East Providence.
Yet more than half of Native Americans live in towns and cities.
According to recent census figures, about 5,200 American Indians and Alaskan Natives live in all of Rhode Island's 39 communities, but most of them live in greater Providence.
The total could be as high as 8,000, says Waldron, because some Indians don't provide accurate information or refuse to participate in census counts.
The Narragansett tribe, with about 2,700 members, is the largest Indian group in the state. Less than half live in Washington County, where the tribal government is based, and only a handful live on the tribe's 1,800 acres in Charlestown.
Reflecting the national demographics, about 1,500 Narragansetts -- about 55 percent -- live north and east of Washington County, mostly in the cities.
"People see Indians as noble savages in leather," Waldron says. "They never see them in a business suit, or buying groceries in the check-out line, or struggling to get into college."
THE MIGRATION to the cities began in the 1950s, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs launched a relocation program, assuring tribal members they would prosper away from poor and crowded reservations.
BIA workers passed out brochures on the reservations that showed executives behind desks or living in quiet suburban homes. They helped the new immigrants shop for soap, groceries and alarm clocks.
But their new life rarely matched the government pictures, says Donald L. Fixico, an Indian and author of The Urban Indian Experience in America.
Some did not speak English. Or they did not understand train and bus schedules and other necessities of urban life. Many could only afford to live in the poorest neighborhoods.
Surrounded by whites, some city Indians felt uncomfortable with their own heritage; yet they could not blend in because of discrimination, Fixico says.
Overwhelmed by prejudice, poverty and lack of opportunity, some Indians drank -- or worse. In 1970, Fixico says, the suicide rate among Indians was twice that of the general population.
Lester Fayerweather, who moved with his mother and 11 siblings to Providence from South Kingstown, remembers trying to get work with a Rhode Island Hospital construction crew in 1970.
When he arrived at the job site, "they said they weren't hiring, to come back next week. At the end of three or four months, more than 250 people were working there and I still wasn't hired."
He finally got a job -- after he picketed the site. Even then, he says, he had to fight for a union card, to get other jobs or earn better pay.
"You want to do what is right," says Fayerweather, who is on the Indian Council's board of directors. "You want to work. But sometimes you can't. It destroys people's lives."
Eventually, Fayerweather started his own construction company and hired other Narragansetts.
BY THE EARLY 1970s, Indians had opened dozens of social-service centers to help their people in cities around the country.
William "Big Toe" Wilcox, a Narragansett, and several other Indians started the Rhode Island Indian Council on Washington Street in 1972.
By the mid-1980s, the nonprofit had a staff of 27 and its budget topped $1 million. But the agency suffered cutbacks under President Reagan and subsequent administrations.
Today, its budget is less than half a million dollars and the staff is around a dozen.
The council got a boost -- and new quarters -- in 1995, with the donation of the former Steere House for Aged Men. Although the council had outgrown its second home, on Friendship Street, some board members worried that the 109-year-old building would be a financial black hole.
But the Mashantucket Pequot tribe and then-Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. helped with repair costs.
And Waldron had a vision. The shuttered four-story building, on a huge lot with a big yard, was a perfect location for Providence's urban agencies. To offset funding losses, the Indian Council began renting rooms. Now, about 50 groups occupy the renamed Algonquin House. They read like a Who's Who of inner-city agencies: Destiny House, the Liberian Community Association, Quisqueyain Action.
The Indian Council helps about 900 Indians a year financially, or through a stop-smoking program, referrals and cultural programs.
A few months ago, it won an award for its Providence work from the U.S. Labor Department.
"If it wasn't for this house, we'd be hurting," says Waldron.
THE HEAVY WOODEN doors rise up from a bank of gray steps and overlook Broad Street, an asphalt ribbon that passes Italian meat markets, Spanish groceries and Asian beauty parlors.
Once, it was an Indian trail. And Providence was a winter home for the Narragansetts, Bliss says.
"We didn't come over with Christopher Columbus," he says. "We didn't come over with the Pilgrims. We didn't come over with the African Americans. We were already here.
"They tried to annihilate us in King Philip's War, but we're still here."
Through his Pequot father and Narragansett mother, Bliss can trace his people to the region's early sachems.
A more recent relative, the Olympic runner Ellison "Tarzan" Brown, soars over the streets of Boston in a 1939 newspaper clipping taped to the back of his office door.
Elsewhere in the room are advertisements for powwows or photos of family members in tribal regalia. Bliss keeps a crow's head in a bag behind his desk. He plans to mount it on a staff one day.
All help to keep his culture alive.
At night, instead of watching TV, he glues beads on headbands. On Friday evenings, he teaches other Indians how to dance or make their own regalia.
He carries a Narragansett Indian tribal card, but not a driver's license. "That's a European thing," he says. Although he's married to a hospital lab technician, he doesn't believe in doctors; he uses his bathroom shower as a sweat lodge, to steam away illnesses.
Bliss and his wife, Junise, a Wampanoag and Pequot, and their children have demonstrated native dances in Rhode Island's public schools for years. But his council job is demanding and Bliss makes fewer school visits these days.
Until recently, the family shared a duplex with his brother Chester on busy Douglas Avenue, near Providence College. Bliss recalls the time he started a ceremonial fire in his yard -- and a neighbor called the Fire Department.
At night, they heard sirens, yells from drunken students, and sometimes gunfire. His children did not live in an Indian world. "Their friends were white, black and Hispanic," he says.
The family recently moved into a ranch house in Warwick, where they have a big yard where planes boom overhead.
One day in his new school, Bliss' 13-year-old son got his braid caught in his shirt. Another boy cut it off with a pair of scissors.
The boy was later suspended but Bliss is still troubled. It's just another example, he says, of the way the tribe's culture is ignored. Hair is sacred to the Narragansetts. "It shows your heritage, who you are," he says.
"My son was scalped," Bliss says.
It's not just the larger culture. He also worries that some of the tribe's children are losing interest in the past.
"The generation is getting weaker and weaker," he says. "Instead of gaining ground, it seems we're losing it.
"I would like my children to continue where I left off. If I don't teach my children about Indian things, who's going to teach them?"
ON A LATE June afternoon, the blue sky above Broad Street is streaked with milky clouds.
A crowd of children gather on the Indian Council lawn. They come from Providence, East Providence, Coventry, West Kingston and Woonsocket.
For nine months, the children have been learning ancient and modern Native American dances from Bliss and his wife.
Junise takes a group of teenage girls inside. In an empty room, they twirl and dip while doing the Eastern Blanket Dance, stretching their red, aqua and beige blankets behind them like wings.
"It's hard to understand the beat of the drum if you come to the dance when you're older," Junise explains. "The circle is round and has strength. We want them on the inside, so they can become a stronger nation."
Outside, with their backs to the street, a dozen boys practice the Arrow Dance. They move from a straight line into a V.
"Don't bend your back, bend your body, bend your knees," instructs Bliss, his face partially shaded by a black cap that says NATIVE.
The boys wear jeans, shorts, cargo pants, T-shirts and numbered jerseys. Their lean brown arms swing at their sides.
The dancers thrust their knees into the air. Their sneakers and black shoes slap against the grass and cracked sidewalks.
They turn one way, then another; they draw into a circle and utter high-pitched shrieks. Their steady steps create a drum beat on the grass and sidewalk, a rhythmic, blood-pounding sound that rises from the former nursing home and is lost in the cacophony of car horns, sirens and boom boxes on Broad Street.
