Big Chief: All is Not Well on the Reservation

 

 

 

Big Chief  (Coming April 2025)

By Jon Hickey

Simon and Schuster, 320 pages.

★★★★

 

Big Chief is about Native Americans, though the title refers to a fortress-like Ford Super-Duty F-350 truck designed to impress and intimidate. Jon Hickey's novel takes place on the Passage Rouge reservation in Wisconsin, which sports a contentious community of Anishinaabe (Chippewa) people. It's Thanksgiving time and an election for tribal chief looms.

 

Non-native peoples often valorize all things Native American. Hickey–like writers such as Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Tommy Orange, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Morgan Talty–reminds us that homegrown discontent runs rampant in indigenous communities. Mack Beck, who drives Big Chief, is the incumbent Passage Rouge chief but faces stiff opposition from Gloria Hawkins. His advisor, 30-year-old Mitch Caddo, is the book’s centerpiece. Mitch is native and the youngest operations director in tribal history, yet an outsider. His mother grew up in Old Village, the original Passage Rouge Settlement, but his white father’s shortcomings led mother and son to flee to Milwaukee. Upon her death Mitch was raised by grandparents before Joe and Maureen Beck, who are white,  brought him back to Passage Rouge and provided him opportunities. 

 

The Becks live on a nicer property than most of their Native neighbors, and raised Mack–and later, Mitch–alongside their biological daughter Layla. Joe knows tribal history and rituals better than most Anishinaabeg, passes on his knowledge, and has done numerous good things for the reservation. For Mitch that’s a mixed blessing. He loves Joe and Maureen, but his mixed blood status, polished manners, Ivy League education, years off the reservation, and law degree make him an outlier.

 

In many ways, Mitchell, Gloria, and Joe are living embodiments of central dilemmas in the novel. Who is a native? If it's solely a matter of blood, how much? Being “red” is up for grabs in Passage Rouge, a place filled with HUD  houses, rivalries, an increasingly militarized tribal police force, and a casino that attracts outsiders when it's not being used as makeshift community center. Mack fancies himself a reformer, but has fallen into some negative old-school ways. Mitch can’t get Mack to realize that Gloria is a serious candidate and that he can’t count on winning by handing out allotment checks, cigarettes, and selective favors or getting heavy-handed when needed. Mitch holds progressive views, but these often clash with running Mack’s campaign. How hard can he push Mack if he wants to remain a political player?  

 

You might wonder why anyone would want to be a player at Passage Rouge. Its politics are like a casino game rigged so that no one wins. You name it and there's a faction for it on the reservation: modernizers, an old boys network, do-gooders, grafters, those who wish to revive old tribal customs, city Indians, reservation Indians…. Not to mention romantic rivalries, some of which revolve around the independent and opinionated Layla. She has moved on from her marriage to Chief of Police Bobby Lone Eagle, who remains territorial and acts like Little Big Man. The reservation is so riven that many speak openly of weaponizing tactics of un-enrolling those who don’t measure up to their particular definition of “Indian” and of exiling non-natives.

 

About the only thing resembling consensus is that few on the reservation trust the government–though many tout their military service and rely upon those allotment checks–and don't want the Department of Justice poking into tribal matters. In such a volatile moment of stress, all that's needed is for someone to light a fuse. Protests, kidnapping, a fatal accident, threats, and a shooting raise different questions about what is meant by Indian blood.

 

Hickey's novel is multilayered. It grapples with very serious identity issues, yet is also shot through with humor. It is about justice in a place in which injustices of all sorts swirl about. It's a romance, but not a conventional one, a murder mystery, and a heroic tale filled with flawed and questionable candidates for said status.

 

One might say that Hickey overdoes rushing from crisis-to-crisis scenarios, but he keeps the pace moving, and presents modern Anishinaabeg life stripped of stereotypes. This is Hickey's first novel and if Big Chief is any indication, the first of many fine books to come.

 

Rob Weir

 

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.