Jon Hickey — Big Chief - with Ian Shapira

Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe's Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack's reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack's estranged sister and Mitch's former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go--and what they will sacrifice--to win it all.But when an accident claims the life of Mitch's mentor, a power broker in the reservation's political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation's descent into violence.Thrilling and timely, Big Chief is an unforgettable story about the search for belonging--to an ancestral and spiritual home, to a family, and to a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668046463?ic_referral=innkY9Px6niDzrgd47kyIvxsm_N--I-Rn94hReAftdQwM0UOYUy41YJyy86Z2geeSo0COwmxOELol7gwDQlWfoPD30luHPM7i1SJC1jLQEfeiPfJlDdM1_roV_esTg3xJ33co2MJon Hickey earned his MFA at Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Sewanee Writers Conference, and he is an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. His short fiction has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast Online, Virginia Quarterly Review, Meridian, and The Madison Review. Jon lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.Hickey is in conversation with Ian Shapira. Shapira has been a staff writer at The Washington Post since 2000. He was on the Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for the paper's coverage of the Virginia Tech mass shooting. His recent stories on racism, sexism, sexual assault and hazing at the Virginia Military Institute won a George Polk award from Long Island University and the Paul Tobenkin award for reporting on discrimination from Columbia University. Over the years, he's also written extensively about the lives and deaths of CIA operatives who have died in the line of duty, especially those who perished in the Afghanistan war. Shapira lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, two daughters, and their dog Merlin. *recorded 5/1/2025