There, There meets Winter Counts in this gripping literary debut about power and corruption, love lost and gained, and the importance of facing one’s past head on.

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 he grew up—hoping to represent disadvantaged families in tribal court. But that was 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 they compromised their morals 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.

Now, on the eve of Passage Rouge’s next tribal election, Mitch finds himself torn between two rivals. He’s unsettled by his own complicity in Mack’s abuse of power, but he doesn’t quite trust Mack’s opponent, Gloria Hawkins, a nationally known activist and politician—whose campaign happens to be run by Layla. But 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.

Compelling and timely, Big Chief is an unforgettable story that asks: What would you do if the very problems you sought to fix consumed you? It’s about the search for belonging, not just as an individual, but as a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.

Jon 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.