Reservation Politics

Sarah McEachern reviews Jon Hickey’s debut novel “Big Chief.”

By Sarah McEachernApril 8, 2025

• Fiction

EARLY ON IN Jon Hickey’s Big Chief (2025), Mitch, the novel’s antihero, visits Waabizh, a medicine man whom his mentor, Joe Beck, respects and trusts. During their conversation, Waabizh refers to Mitch by his Anishinaabemowin name, Mishkigabo—a name Waabizh found for him in a ceremonial vision. Later, Waabizh’s son Reed, who dislikes Mitch, calls him a “J.Crew Indian.” A careful irony and humor lie behind these interactions: while a tribal elder uses Mitch’s traditional name, Mitch is insulted, seconds later, for wearing clothes too nice to be Native. Reed and Mitch discuss the scandal of tribal disenrollment under the political administration Mitch runs in the shadows. Both Reed and Waabizh were disenrolled years before and are no longer legally considered Native American. What it means to properly appear and be recognized as authentically Native are at the heart of Big Chief’s depiction of Native American life.

When we meet the Wise Elders of Passage Rouge Nation, a reservation in Northern Wisconsin (population 3,000), the characters are much too smart for simple stereotypes. They’re all politicians who grasp, use, and manipulate stereotypes for their own political advantage. Mitch himself often plays the role of the loyal sidekick. He is the Tonto to Mack Beck’s Lone Ranger. Mack is his best friend and the ideal figurehead for their administration, propping up Mitch’s policies with a rez personality that can win votes. After gaining the tribal presidency with some luck, Mack and Mitch take over and find out that, although they’re young, smart, and in charge, it’s quite hard running a tribal government. They’re also a bit drunk on power, with a reelection only days away.

Mitch isn’t that loyal either—he doubts Mack almost as much as Mack doubts himself. While Mack is emotional, Mitch plays off him as the Stoic Indian in their administration. This, too, is a front—he’s starting rumors, using burner Facebook accounts, about their adversary, Gloria Hawkins, an old-school activist politician who usually doesn’t win anything. Gloria is being bankrolled by Joe Beck, Mitch’s mentor and Mack’s father, and her campaign aide, Layla, is Mack’s sister and Mitch’s former lover. We meet Gloria at a campaign event as she “cries dignified, sorrowful tears” while an elder recounts the abuses she faced in a residential school as a girl. Mitch notes, “There’s grim certainty in her eyes even when she affects breezy sophistication or respectful piousness (whenever the occasion calls for it). She’s running a real campaign this time.” Everyone is code-switching, using Anishinaabe words, amping up their rez accents, and falling into common stereotypes to camouflage the dark underbelly of their own urges, desires, and ambitions. This is indeed a real campaign.

Race and ethnicity—the social constructs we use to perceive and conceptualize others—are understood through what Claudia Rankine calls “the racial imaginary.” What an American Indian looks like, how one is defined, what they sound like, where they are supposed to live, and how they are supposed to fit into American life are all questions that have plagued the country for centuries. The answers given have been more frequently imposed by those with unchecked racial imaginations—chimokomonaag, or white people—rather than found in literature written by intelligent writers who are themselves Native and struggling with these questions. Paramount to that, the Bureau of Indian Affairs—and the American government in general—has supplied the answers to these questions through policies and laws that continue to dictate and shape the lives of Native Americans. In the publishing industry, these questions are understood via an exoticization, fetishization, and commodification of otherness—turning it into a metadata tag or a toxically “positive” stereotype. Respectability politics abound, but so too does the marketing mirage that people are very brave for being anything other than white—and that their bravery and suffering make them white people’s finest educators about the human experience. Which is why you should buy their novels.

Big Chief is not focused on answering questions about what it means to be Native American—admittedly, the novel is certainly aware of and intrigued by this dialogue—nor does it seek to offer an “educational” experience. That’s just not the type of novel it’s interested in being. Rather, Big Chief is an entertaining political thriller. It doesn’t settle on this genre due to a lack of cleverness, however. Underneath its suspense and satire is a real understanding of 21st-century Native American experience; Hickey’s depiction of the reality of reservation life eschews stereotypes and caricatures in favor of complex, multifaceted people. More than that, what better place to set a political thriller than on a reservation? The politics are fascinating, and underexplored. Big Chief makes Conclave (2016) look like kids’ stuff.

The book’s primary interest, though, is belonging. Not because it’s about Native characters whose homeland has been forcibly taken from them by government policy—although one of the major plot arcs deals directly with land reclamation—but because being “an Other” generally means that one doesn’t belong. The characters in Big Chief are not really outsiders, though; they are all clearly fighting for control of a community to which they have strong ties. Everyone knows them; they’re all small-town kids. As in so many areas, Big Chief goes full tilt into the idea of belonging from about 20 different dimensions, all balanced successfully. Hickey is too smart to reduce the topic to a plot about land reclamation; instead, it’s part of a much larger, more complex discussion.

Even though people on the reservation have known Mitch his whole life, he often feels like an outsider. His white father left him and his mother when he was young, and his mother’s many hard restarts often landed them living with her own parents in Passage Rouge. This sort of in-and-out childhood on the reservation, along with the absence of his white father, leaves Mitch frequently feeling neither Native nor white enough. His mother’s death in a car accident a few years before the story begins orphans Mitch, leaving him with only Joe, a kind of father figure. There’s also a larger plot point about belonging—the phenomenon of tribal disenrollment. The use and abuse of this process as a political tool of Mitch and Mack’s administration, which slowly gives way to corruption, becomes central to the plot and the campaign. Soon, the easiest way to win the election seems to be to unenroll Gloria herself, pulling her off the ballot. While tribal enrollment has a particular meaning not easily replicable, books about being mixed-race and losing your mother are ubiquitous in American literature, from classics like Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) to Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995).

Throughout Big Chief, there’s also an underlying interest in how education can push you away from your community and make you into an outsider—a “J.Crew Indian.” All the main characters are well educated—Layla is planning to attend law school, Joe and Mitch both went to Ivy League colleges, Mack has a college degree. Mitch is sometimes aware of the biting irony he feels at having an education yet also dealing with issues of poverty and undereducation on the reservation (he sometimes calls this “Rezy shit”). This gap gets in his way as a politician, while Mack doesn’t have as much conflict. A similar exploration is the main crux of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), a YA novel that focuses on these themes from the perspective of a reservation teenager attending a nearly all-white public school. Hickey seems well aware of the major books that have treated these topics, but he makes a point that the complications his characters grapple with throughout the narrative are not in any way trying to emulate any of these books.

Ultimately, the source of Mitch’s trouble in finding a place to belong can be traced to his mother’s death. An image reprised repeatedly is the sacred fire Mitch is designated to keep burning during the period between her death and her burial. The fire is meant to guide her into the realm of the creator, but it also functions as a kind of wake, a chance for others to sit with Mitch and let him process his grief. Mitch’s interactions, thoughts, and feelings while sitting at this fire form the novel’s central touchstone, a memory he returns to even more than his summer of secret, intense love with Layla. The grief Mitch experiences at his loss is intolerable: “I couldn’t trust the world or anyone or any place anymore,” he thinks. How to belong in a world without a mother or a father? It’s a hard question. Mitch’s insecurities about how he fits in on the reservation are tied to his grief. He feels apprehensive about the alternative father Joe represents for him, yet his rejection of Joe only makes him feel more alone in the world.

Parental loss in Native communities has historically been linked to governmental action: forced family separation, removal acts, residential boarding schools, foster care systems. The loss of a mother also evokes the Murdered and Missing Indigenous People Crisis. Such ongoing, systemic violence against Native people is certainly present in Big Chief. Indeed, Hickey includes a discussion of law enforcement’s delay in looking for a missing woman. Both of Mitch’s grandparents went to residential schools, and Mitch’s mother, a lawyer, worked in the tribe’s family services department. After her death, Mitch’s return to the reservation involves working in his mother’s old job. She dies in a universal, common manner (a car accident), but the loss pivots Mitch into a place where he is still compelled to grasp the very specific ways Native people experience parental loss—through the long shadow of government policies.

What really makes Big Chief special, though, is the author’s deep understanding of the complex social, cultural, and legal politics of reservation life. The problem of competing jurisdictions, for example, plays out when DOJ agents, riot police, and the FBI come to the reservation. This idea of the reservation as an in-between place—not quite America, but uniquely American—is where a lot of the characters’ complex yearning for belonging originates. Reservations can also be places of poverty and dysfunction, also often engineered by government policies. The reservation is a frequently paradoxical setting in Native American literature, and characters’ complicated relationships with its in-betweenness become a frequent focus of resentment, because these locations are where the American government has decided Native Americans are supposed to exist. When Mitch sees Mack later in the novel, he notes that off-rez, they’re both nobodies.

Yet the in-betweenness of reservation life is ultimately not the main way Mitch experiences having “one foot in two canoes.” Big Chief feels less like recent novels of Native life, such as the work of Tommy Orange or Sherman Alexie, and more reminiscent of N. Scott Momaday’s classic House Made of Dawn (1968). Like Momaday’s Abel, adrift after returning from war, the protagonist of Hickey’s novel also struggles to find his place in the world, though the myths, visions, and traditions that trouble Abel have waned somewhat. Because Mitch is a lawyer, the two worlds he straddles are legal systems—the American government’s versus that of the reservation. When Gloria criticizes Mitch, she says, “Our ways are incompatible with the systems they impose on us. The BIA. Department of the Interior. Federal government. It creates very strange situations and strange incentives.” It’s in this impossible in-betweenness that Mitch must discover how to live his life.

The work of Louise Erdrich, especially The Round House (2012) and The Night Watchman (2020), offer artful and overt political statements about how Indian law shapes the lives of Native Americans, but Big Chief is less interested in making political statements than in pleasurably deploying politics as plot. It’s fun to read about all the wheeling and dealing, with characters duking it out over the control of what is essentially a very small town (as well as a sovereign nation). The novel is aware that the bad things happening are the direct result of individuals who had gotten a little too drunk on power, but also a consequence of their being set up to fail by the American government. Big Chief understands the unique double consciousness of what it means to be Native American—the political workings of a tribe, the meaning of belonging under Indian law. But the novel is smart enough to keep all these ideas swirling, using them as the backdrop for an engrossing political thriller. Hickey’s characters are relatable people with rich emotional lives, yet these very feelings become fuel for political power plays. His characters do bad things even though they are not bad people. Hickey is clever enough to know that real people rarely fit into any single mode or stereotypical role, and novels don’t need to either.