Love, Loyalty, and Tribal Law

Big Chief has been hailed as the “great Native American political novel.”

Mitch Caddo never intended to practice law for the Passage Rouge Nation. But in Jon Hickey ’04’s debut novel, Big Chief, Mitch is the top adviser to sitting Passage Rouge president Mack Beck at the dawn of a heated election, and not even an Ivy League law degree can prepare him for the legal, ethical, and personal battles that lie ahead.

Before they headed up the Passage Rouge tribal government, Mack and Mitch were childhood friends: Mack, the lifelong reservation kid raised in an affluent home by his adoptive parents; Mitch, the mixed-race, white-passing son of a single mother who raised him on and off the “rez” until they were embraced by the Becks. When Mack’s embattled presidency estranges him and Mitch from the Beck family, and as the impending election pushes Mack to abuses of power aimed at undercutting his opponent, Mitch must determine where his loyalties lie — and where, if anywhere, he truly belongs.

“Hickey’s depiction of the reality of reservation life eschews stereotypes and caricatures in favor of complex, multifaceted people,” writes Sarah McEachern for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Big Chief understands the unique double consciousness of what it means to be Native American.”

Hickey based the fictional Passage Rouge Nation on real Anishinaabe tribes of Minnesota and Wisconsin, particularly the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, of which he is a member. Big Chief was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times, and it was featured in the 2025 Wisconsin Book Festival.

“We’ve been waiting for the great Native American political novel, and here it is,” writes author David Heska Wanbli Weiden, calling Big Chief a “tremendous debut.”

Published in the Spring 2026 issue