Big Chief
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- ¥1,700
発行者による作品情報
Mitch Caddo started out with the best of intentions—after his mother’s sudden death in a car crash, he finished law school and returned to Passage Rouge, the reservation where she grew up. Though an outsider to the tribe himself, he sought to help his new community by representing disadvantaged families in tribal court. But that was before--before he got sucked into the world of Mack Plum, his charismatic childhood friend. Before Mack ran and won the race for Tribal President as an underdog populist. Before he and Mitch became the people who would do anything to keep Mack at the head of the tribal council. And before he came face to face once again with his teenage flame Layla Plum, none other than Mack’s sister, who had returned to Passage Rouge for her own reasons.
Now on the eve of Passage Rouge’s next tribal election, Mitch finds himself torn between two rivals: he’s unsettled by Mack’s abuses of power and his own complicity in them, but he doesn’t quite trust Gloria Hawkins, Mack’s opponent--a nationally known activist and politician who has Layla running her campaign. When an accident claims the life of a central figure in the reservation’s complicated political landscape, the election descends into chaos, and Mitch and Layla find themselves trying to stop the tribe’s slide towards all-out violence while doing their best to correct the wrongs of the past.
Big Chief tells a story about the search for belonging, not just as an individual, but as a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hickey's engrossing debut revolves around a tribal power struggle and a young political fixer's reckoning with his identity. At 30, narrator Mitch Caddo is the youngest-ever operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe in Wisconsin. Due to his "white-passing face" and Cornell law degree, Mitch is derided as a "J. Crew Indian," but his close friendship with tribal president Mack Beck, whom he helped get elected, affords him power and prestige. Now, however, Mack's facing a tough reelection challenge from opponent Gloria Hawkins, whose campaign levels the same allegations of inaction and mismanagement against Mack that plagued his predecessor, and who happens to be backed by Mack's adoptive father, Joe. As the campaign's de facto fixer, Mitch launches a smear offensive against Hawkins, which dredges up evidence that Joe embezzled tribal funds. Though the prose can be clunky (Mack's face is described as "ursine" six times), there's a great deal of satisfaction in watching Hickey gradually peel back the layers of Mitch's ambition, bravado, and questionable ethics to reveal his vulnerabilities, especially as the political machine begins to falter during the increasingly explosive election season. It's a fresh take on the political novel.
