10-04-2025
All Politics Is Local. In This Novel, It's Incestuous.
Mitch Caddo, the narrator of Jon Hickey's debut novel, 'Big Chief,' introduces himself with a summary of his LinkedIn profile: tribal operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe, chief operations officer of the reservation casino, legislative liaison, Cornell Law J.D. and all-around whiz kid.
In fact, though, Mitch, a 30-year-old 'white-passing' mixed-race Indian, has his hands full propping up the tribal president, Mack Beck, who faces an uphill re-election battle. Voted in two years earlier because he 'looked the part' with his ribbon shirts, thunderbird medallion, long braid and reservation cred — and also because the incumbent failed to obtain enough propane for the tribe as an Upper Midwest winter set in — Mack is an incompetent and vindictive alcoholic. He's also a patronage politician who dips into the general fund to pad distributions to tribal citizens and freely banishes troublemakers and political opponents from the reservation.
Part chief of staff, part campaign director and part hatchet man, Mitch operates in the background, ambivalently overseeing 'the quiet, permanent tragedy of Passage Rouge,' a community of 5,000 stricken by poverty, addiction, inadequate housing, corruption and police brutality.
Unfolding over the week preceding the election, the novel concerns which of the two opposing camps can secure electoral victory by most cynically leveraging the chronically bad news emanating from Passage Rouge. While Mack is a disaster for the tribe, his rival, Gloria Hawkins — a polished activist and perennial third-party gubernatorial also-ran — scarcely inspires more confidence.
Gloria is backed by Joe Beck, the tribe's Boston Brahmin but Indian-fetishizing general counsel, who lives on an opulent lakeside compound within the reservation. He's also Mitch's mentor and benefactor, and the adoptive father of Mack, from whom he is estranged, and Mack's sister, Layla. Additional thickeners to the plot include the fact that Layla, who is divorced from Mack's thuggish police chief, Bobby Lone Eagle, also works for Gloria, and years before had a fling with the Cornell-bound Mitch. If all politics is local, Passage Rouge's politics is positively incestuous. When Joe is implicated in financial misdeeds connected to land deals conducted on the tribe's behalf, Mack seizes upon the news to banish Joe from the reservation, a symbolic patricide also intended to damage Gloria's campaign. Things rapidly go downhill for everyone from there.
'Big Chief' maintains a tight time frame, with each of its sections, apart from a brief postscript, devoted to a single day. This helps keep the book on the rails, given the numerous characters and events that fill its pages. Activists, council members, medicine men, tribal elders, cops, F.B.I. agents, ghosts and others strut and fret their hour upon the stage in a compact saga containing demonstrations, political skulduggery, family rifts, the arrival of federal investigators, betrayals, a fiery plane crash, an old flame rekindled, a police shooting, a narrow escape from death, a riot and multiple flashbacks.
Such events drive the narrative forward, but despite the sound and fury, the novel has a strangely vacant center. This is not inadvertent. As a protagonist, Mitch is pretty elusive by design, uncertain of his own motives, desires and objectives. Raised largely off the reservation and long absent while attending college and law school, Mitch is an outsider who experiences alienation wherever he is, but most acutely among 'his' people, who mock him as a 'J. Crew Indian.' Lacking friends, family and a set of clear principles, he's one of Eliot's 'hollow men,' never sure what he's doing in Passage Rouge or why he persists in the dutifully unscrupulous performance of his role as Mack's fixer.
Hickey's writing can be workmanlike, even awkward. A character's 'expression looks annoyed at the wind blowing her hair sideways.' An envelope is 'thrumming with an electrical pulse.' A car sits 'idling a lazy curl of thick exhaust that dances.' Mack is described as 'ursine' seven times, by my count.
But about two-thirds of the way through, Buzz, the former tribal president, tells Mitch a story about leading a captured deer into the middle of a house party, where it wreaks havoc among the drunken revelers before it is shot. It's a wonderful set piece: unexpected, disturbingly funny, the vernacular stylized with the lightest touch — the sort of work that betokens genuine talent, with the promise of more to come.
For the most part, 'Big Chief' cultivates an uneasy atmosphere. Full of cagey, terse, veiled exchanges between people bound together by self-interest who do not seem to like or trust each other much, it creates suspense not from the question of whether open conflict will take place, but when. A new boss, it suggests, will be the same as the old. The message, if the book can be said to offer one, is subtle: Unsparing of them as 'Big Chief' is, its movers and shakers have been 'working with the wrong tools' imposed by a colonizing force uninterested in Anishinaabe culture. It is 'an affliction,' Mitch observes. And 'if there's a medicine for it,' he adds, 'it still eludes me.'
