BIG CHIEF

Part literary political thriller and part exploration of one man's search for meaning.

Mitch Caddo started out with the best of intentions -after his mother's sudden death in a car crash, he finished law school and returned to Passage Rouge, the reservation where she grew up. Though an outsider to the tribe himself, he sought to help his new community by representing disadvantaged families in tribal court. But that was before: before he got sucked into the world of Mack Fournier, his charismatic childhood friend. Before Mack ran and won the race for tribal president as an underdog populist. Before he and Mitch became the people who would do anything to keep Mack at the head of the tribal council. Now the president's right-hand man on the eve of Passage Rouge's tribal election, Mitch finds himself torn between two rivals: he's unsettled by Mack's abuses of power and his own complicity in them, but he doesn't trust Gloria Hawkins, Mack's opponent and a nationally known activist and politician. When an accident claims the life of Mitch's mentor and former kingmaker Joe Plum, the election descends into chaos as the two camps prepare to seize power by any means necessary. Mitch and Layla Plum, Joe's adopted daughter, find themselves trying to stop the tribe's slide towards all-out violence while doing their best to correct the wrongs of the past. Big Chief tells a story about the search for belonging, not just as an individual, but as a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance. In its depiction of contemporary Indigenous life, it sits alongside Tommy Orange's There There, Brandon Hobson's Where the Dead Sit Talking, and Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman. It takes stylistic and thematic inspiration from Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Jon Hickey's short fiction has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast Online, Virginia Quarterly Review, Meridian, and The Madison Review. He earned his MFA at Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Sewanee Writers Conference, and he is an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.