Jon Hickey, whose debut novel, Big Chief, was published by Simon & Schuster in April, introduced by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, author of the novel Winter Counts, published by Ecco in 2020. (Credit: Hickey: Sarah Peterson; Weiden: Aslan Chalom)
I met Jon Hickey at the Tin House Summer Workshop in 2018, where we were assigned to Benjamin Percy’s fiction workshop. Jon and I were both delighted to find another Native person in the class, and we spent many hours in Portland, Oregon, talking about Indigenous literature, culture, and ideas. During the intensive, Jon and I shared very early versions of what would become our debut novels.
So I was somewhat familiar with the plot and characters of Big Chief, but the final form of the book was startling in its intensity and fully realized vision. I was blown away by the compelling characters—many of whom reminded me of people I know—as well as the way in which Jon skillfully integrates the themes of Indigenous sovereignty, identity, and community. Featuring Mitch Caddo, a young lawyer and emerging political operative for the Passage Rouge Nation, the novel follows his efforts to get his best friend reelected as tribal president. However, as events spiral badly out of control, Mitch must reconcile the limits of his ambition with his principles. The book is a real page-turner with a wry satiric edge, and Native readers especially will find Jon’s portrayal of reservation politics both amusing and all too realistic.
During our Tin House workshop you submitted a very early section from Big
Chief. How did the book change after those early drafts?
The start of our friendship! That turned out to be quite a prolific workshop cohort, and it was a pleasure to be a part of it. After I workshopped that very early chapter, it took a long time for Big Chief to find its natural form. The novel had a much longer time frame than it does now, spanning multiple years, decades even. But the immediate, urgent story—the days before the election—was always there, and over the course of a couple of drafts, that election weekend became the focus of the narrative. I found there was an endless source of things that I was interested in, but including them took away from the immediacy of the present-day narrative. Once that fell into place, and once I was at peace with cutting almost half my novel—and backfilling some of it—Big Chief became what it is now.
Big Chief is, among other things, a novel of politics in the tradition of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. But there are very few Native novels that deal so explicitly with the complicated world of tribal councils and reservation politics. Did you plan to make politics the cornerstone of the novel, or did that develop over time?
I’m glad you picked up on the allusions to All the King’s Men, which was entirely intentional, as I consider Warren’s book a sort of spiritual precursor to Big Chief. They are both novels about politics, but also about a search for meaning, at least I hope so for my novel. I would be remiss in not mentioning some of my debut’s antecedents, such as Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and The Night Watchman, James Welch’s The Indian Lawyer—books that taught me that a story like this can be both substantive and intriguing.
I’ve always been interested in how power works on reservations, much as your novel Winter Counts delves into the legal gray areas inherent in Indian law. These are fundamentally local elections but with the added complexities of leading sovereign entities and, in some cases, multimillion-dollar economies. I’ve sensed the rich dramatic possibilities of the reservation political process for a while now, and I knew that my book would take place during an election, but it took time to find the correct format and characters. And to my surprise it took years to realize that I wasn’t just talking about politics. I was talking about a character in search of a spiritual center, a character questioning his very identity and sense of belonging. There are other ways to get there, but for me politics and the corrupting influence of power were the most direct route to what I was trying to write about.
I love the character of Mitch Caddo, who’s both calculating and sincere while dealing with his own insecurities and issues regarding his identity. Did this protagonist change over the course of your writing the novel?
Mitch definitely took some time to develop. I identify with Mitch in certain important aspects of his character; as I’ve gotten older I often question my own sense of spirituality, where it comes from and how to nurture it. And I’ve had ambitions and difficulties in finding my own place among my community. Mitch also shares qualities with a lot of younger people I know, and his quest mirrors those who have inspired me in their dedication to service, their talents, their abilities.
But unlike these idealistic people I know, Mitch, in the beginning at least, lacks a certain moral center. He’s ruthless in ways and feels justified in his ruthlessness. In the early drafts I felt like his voice was withholding things, hiding some true feelings out of insecurity. I felt like my job was to put him in increasingly stressful situations where withholding was no longer an option. And once I got to those deep, dark secrets, I began to empathize with him.
Did you consider the themes of the novel as you wrote it? If so, did they evolve as you revised the manuscript?
Because this is my first book, I was taking care not to throw every single theme into it. I don’t want to give the impression that I sit down at my desk thinking, “What is my theme?” It comes out as, “Why are you writing this?” The answer is that I want to write about the things I care deeply about, my questioning of my identity and who I am to my family, both immediate and extended. The themes started as questions: Who “belongs” to a tribe or nation? Who gets to decide? How does one get to that seemingly impossible state of satisfaction? As the book goes on, the answers to those questions begin to emerge, as does the purpose of the novel as I understand it. It took me a while to figure out exactly what I was trying to say about those themes.
There has been an explosion of Indigenous art in the past decade, especially in the literary sphere. Not just literary fiction, but Native horror, speculative, crime, and romance novels have been published recently. How do you see Big Chief fitting into this new landscape of Native literature?
We live in exciting times for Indigenous art and literature, don’t we? It was so exciting to see your novel really catch readers’ imaginations in the literary crime and thriller genres—can’t wait for the sequel. And we have some incredible authors who have come out with books recently, or have books forthcoming, like Kyle Edwards, Carson Faust, Eliana Ramage, Aaron John Curtis, and Jake Skeets, to name just a few.
This explosion of new works is important for so many reasons, namely broadening the breadth of what we know as “Indigenous” fiction, as it’s necessary to show that there is no unitary Indigenous experience. Those of us who are citizens of these First Nations have varying degrees of familiarity and belongingness with our people. So many of us live off reservations, some of us are enrolled and some of us aren’t, and we all have different relationships to our cultures. The conventional wisdom is to try to put all of us Indigenous artists in easily recognizable boxes, and Big Chief is meant to address this. Outside of our communities, there are certain expectations placed upon us to demonstrate our experiences in outdated imagery, and there’s a premium on surfaces, images, stereotypes.
In my case, I’m the second generation that has lived primarily off the reservation, but our roots are deep, and my living elsewhere doesn’t take away from my experience, or my obligations to my nation. I hope Big Chief will find Native readers who know these feelings, readers going through their own searches, but I also hope that non-Indigenous readers grasp that same meaning.
An excerpt from Big Chief
Chapter 1
The season’s first shiver comes on Thanksgiving morning, five days before the election.
It’s a passing shudder when I leave for work and see the dead leaves and pine needles standing defiantly through the soft snow that blankets the Passage Rouge Indian Reservation. The shudder becomes a shake as I scrape the frost glaze off my windshield and fumble with my car keys. I try to keep it together when I drive through what’s left of the Old Village, where my grandparents and ancestors once survived the harsh winters, but when I pass the blind corner outside the Chippewa Super, where ten years ago my mother eased her car onto Highway 92 and into the path of four high school kids with a handle of E&J brandy and a stolen 1994 Pontiac Grand Prix, the shiver is chattering my teeth together. But then it’s gone and I’m standing in the parking lot looking up at the log cabin facade of the Golden Eagle Casino and Resort, briefcase in hand, confused and thinking of a question my mother might have asked me had she lived to see this: Mitch Caddo, what, exactly, are you doing here?
I’m thirty years old, the youngest-ever tribal operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe, a tribe of about five thousand enrolled members. Our reservation is in the north woods of Wisconsin, nestled within a confluence of picturesque lakes and lush forest that has drawn the chimokomonaag, the whites, and their money for more than three centuries. We’re not huge like the Navajo nation, but we’re bigger than our neighbors in Bad River and Menominee, and we have federal recognition and a sovereign constitutional government. Its bureaucracy—legal, business development, education, safety, enrollment, health and family services, et al.—answers to me, and I’m also the chief operations officer of Passage Rouge Golden Eagle Enterprises, the limited-liability corporation that manages the day-to-day operations at the Golden Eagle Casino and Resort, the economic center of the reservation that rakes in $25 million a year, home of the loosest slots in the state.
I’m the suit and tie, the short haircut, the white-passing face of Passage Rouge when we have business with the chimokomonaag. On the top floor of the Golden Eagle, though, inside the Migizi Suite, presides the man I put up there just two years ago, Mack Beck, tribal president. While I take meetings with the state reps looking for outfield chatter for whatever Indian Country bills they’re moving through the legislature, or knuckle down with the governor’s office to discuss the compacts regulating our gaming operations, Mack Beck is the name at the top of the ticket, the ursine face smiling from the billboards and campaign signs staked along the highway. He represented us in the intertribal delegation to DC, where he grip-and-grinned with the president in the East Room of the White House, while I stayed in Passage Rouge for budget meetings, steering and development committees, and the granular minutiae that Mack Beck can’t be bothered with. He’s ceremonial in all senses of the word. He is the look. I’m the substance.
Does the unequal workload make me bitter? Not in the least. I’m a pragmatist. I’m too much of an outsider, a suburban Indian, to pull enough Passage Rouge votes to get anywhere near the council. Mack doesn’t have that problem. He looks the part and says the right words. Neither of us got here alone, and together we wield power not normally afforded to kids like us.
But what good is power if you can’t keep it? That’s the other part of my job. Over the last three months, I’ve handed over the bulk of my duties to the ancient order of aunties who run the tribal government so I can figure out how to get Mack reelected to another two-year term. In less than a week, the people of Passage Rouge will come down to the William R. Paulson Tribal Government Center on Peace Pipe Road to cast ballots for tribal president and council. Our election is too small for anything resembling scientific polling, but if you take the angry, misspelled all-caps posts on Facebook and the picketers loitering outside the Government Center as indicators of how our campaign is going, you might come to the reasonable conclusion that the president’s reelection prospects are in trouble. Or, in the words of our great orator and chief, straight-up fucked.
Is this the source of this morning’s shiver? The very real prospect of defeat? Nobody thinks that’s fun. And “fall guy” is in the unwritten job description of the operations director. I take the blame when everything goes wrong. His failure is my failure, and that’s the way it’s been from the jump.
But as I get myself correct in the lobby of the Eagle and swipe at the permanent sleeplessness in my reddened eyes, I suspect that this November shiver is bigger than just next week’s election. It’s an existential shiver. After all the sacrifices I’ve made, people I’ve disappointed, laws we may have broken, and maybe a lost election, is this all there is? Just what did I trade in my meager decency for?
From Big Chief. Copyright © 2025 by Jon Hickey. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
