San Francisco writer Jon Hickey, a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Chippewa Indians from Wisconsin, tells a riveting and complex story set on a fictional reservation in his new, first novel.
In “Big Chief” (Simon & Schuster, 319 pages, $28.99, April 8, 2025), the 5,000-member Passage Rouge Nation is financed by a corporate casino and resort, but tribal president Mack Beck and his childhood friend Mitch Caddo, the youngest ever tribal operations director, are its true governors.
Written from 30-year-old Mitch’s perspective, “Big Chief” begins on the eve of Mack’s reelection, when his candidacy is threatened by a political activist, Gloria Hawkins.
Among the book’s thunderous undercurrents and themes are accidental deaths, community riots, tense parent-child bonds, events testing relationships, questions of individual identity, sacrifices made to preserve personal or professional integrity and legal issues surrounding the sanctity of sovereign nations.
Yet, with its impeccable pacing and deeply drawn characters, “Big Chief” is a swift read. It’s like a tunnel that becomes narrower and narrower until the reader is crawling forward, compelled to find light (while fearing darkness) at the end.
“The repeating cycles of trauma, pacing that, was one of the main challenges,” says Hickey, who appears at Green Apple Books in San Francisco on April 8. “I was wary of politics as a subject, and because it was my first book, I wanted to throw everything into it. I also didn’t want it to be didactic, with an agenda. Was I being too obvious with the motifs? It ended up getting pared back. And that squeeze? It begins to happen around page 200.”
The crescendo occurs as Mitch reveals his inner turmoil; from then on, the drama compounds and accelerates. Hickey says, “Everything is coming to a boil. The Mitch character started as more passive because, in conversation with me as the writer, he was withholding. There was a political, diplomatic way he dealt with the world. He was ignoring his own culpability. He goes from being an observer to where we see he’s in some ways the guy pulling the strings.”
Hickey, who grew up in Milwaukee and Northfield, Minnesota, and whose ancestors are Anishinaabe, Indigenous peoples of Great Lakes region, says he would go to Flambeau regularly. His grandparents moved back there, after being relocated to Chicago after World War II. Meanwhile, his parents just moved there.
He says, “Living off and then returning to the reservation, it’s like a homeland. There’s a deep connection. I took Flambeau for granted but remember my mother telling me it was sacred land important to our ancestors. To my parents, it was a spiritual center.”
In “Big Chief,” humor, affinities and schisms due to death, economic and cultural disparities, racism and gender bias running throughout are matched with “just enough research to write as correctly as needed” about details such as Public Law 280. Enacted in 1953, it changed legal jurisdiction on Indian lands and over Indian persons.
But Hickey says research didn’t play the largest role in developing “Big Chief”: “The book’s more about the human side of it. The characters developed over drafts. It felt like a natural evolution as I got to know them. Mitch’s void of his missing parents revealed a spiritual void he tries to fill through power. Mack, the skinny, tall kid who gains mass as an adult, which mirrors the space he starts taking up in Mitch’s life. Mack’s needs and ambitions loom large.”
Also, throughout his writing process, Hickey was careful to balance descriptions of toxic struggles in tribal communities without overstating them.
“One concern was leaving the impression that corruption was inherent to Anishinaabe culture. I had a Canadian First Nations author who picked up that these systems of government are imposed by the federal government. This isn’t how things were done way back when. It brings incentives of corruption when you have a sovereign entity in a very small place. It’s small-town politics, basically. In tribes in this country, there’s cynicism about governance, but there are also many, many good people and governances.”
However, Hickey, unlike his parents, doesn’t feel compelled to return to his homeland, even though he and his wife have two young sons enrolled in the tribe. He says, “They have status and treaty rights when they choose to go back. But, living in San Francisco, it takes a bit to get there. My wife’s parents are Chinese, so that cultural identity is definitely more available. It’s important they understand the Anishinaabe part of themselves. We try to provide regular reinforcement by returning to Flambeau whenever possible.”
Jon Hickey appears at 7 p.m. April 8 at Green Apple Books, 1231 Ninth Ave., San Francisco. Visit greenapplebooks.com or watch the talk here.
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