Chapter 1 - 1 - The season's first shiver comes on Thanksgiving morning, five days before the election. It's a passing shudder when I leave for work and see the dead leaves and pine needles standing defiantly through the soft snow that blankets the Passage Rouge Indian Reservation. The shudder becomes a shake as I scrape the frost glaze off my windshield and fumble with my car keys. I try to keep it together when I drive through what's left of the Old Village, where my grandparents and ancestors once survived the harsh winters, but when I pass the blind corner outside the Chippewa Super, where ten years ago my mother eased her car onto Highway 92 and into the path of four high school kids with a handle of E&J brandy and a stolen 1994 Pontiac Grand Prix, the shiver is chattering my teeth together. But then it's gone and I'm standing in the parking lot looking up at the log cabin facade of the Golden Eagle Casino and Resort, briefcase in hand, confused and thinking of a question my mother might have asked me had she lived to see this: Mitch Caddo, what, exactly, are you doing here? I'm thirty years old, the youngest-ever tribal operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe, a tribe of about five thousand enrolled members. Our reservation is in the north woods of Wisconsin, nestled within a confluence of picturesque lakes and lush forest that has drawn the chimokomonaag , the whites, and their money for more than three centuries. We're not huge like the Navajo nation, but we're bigger than our neighbors in Bad River and Menominee, and we have federal recognition and a sovereign constitutional government. Its bureaucracy--legal, business development, education, safety, enrollment, health and family services, et al.--answers to me, and I'm also the chief operations officer of Passage Rouge Golden Eagle Enterprises, the limited-liability corporation that manages the day-to-day operations at the Golden Eagle Casino and Resort, the economic center of the reservation that rakes in $25 million a year, home of the loosest slots in the state. I'm the suit and tie, the short haircut, the white-passing face of Passage Rouge when we have business with the chimokomonaag. On the top floor of the Golden Eagle, though, inside the Migizi Suite, presides the man I put up there just two years ago, Mack Beck, tribal president. While I take meetings with the state reps looking for outfield chatter for whatever Indian Country bills they're moving through the legislature, or knuckle down with the governor's office to discuss the compacts regulating our gaming operations, Mack Beck is the name at the top of the ticket, the ursine face smiling from the billboards and campaign signs staked along the highway. He represented us in the intertribal delegation to DC, where he grip-and-grinned with the president in the East Room of the White House, while I stayed in Passage Rouge for budget meetings, steering and development committees, and the granular minutiae that Mack Beck can't be bothered with. He's ceremonial in all senses of the word. He is the look. I'm the substance. Does the unequal workload make me bitter? Not in the least. I'm a pragmatist. I'm too much of an outsider, a suburban Indian, to pull enough Passage Rouge votes to get anywhere near the council. Mack doesn't have that problem. He looks the part and says the right words. Neither of us got here alone, and together we wield power not normally afforded to kids like us. But what good is power if you can't keep it? That's the other part of my job. Over the last three months, I've handed over the bulk of my duties to the ancient order of aunties who run the tribal government so I can figure out how to get Mack reelected to another two-year term. In less than a week, the people of Passage Rouge will come down to the William R. Paulson Tribal Government Center on Peace Pipe Road to cast ballots for tribal president and council. Our election is too small for anything resembling scientific polling, but if you take the angry, misspelled all-caps posts on Facebook and the picketers loitering outside the Government Center as indicators of how our campaign is going, you might come to the reasonable conclusion that the president's reelection prospects are in trouble. Or, in the words of our great orator and chief, straight-up fucked . Is this the source of this morning's shiver? The very real prospect of defeat? Nobody thinks that's fun. And "fall guy" is in the unwritten job description of the operations director. I take the blame when everything goes wrong. His failure is my failure, and that's the way it's been from the jump. But as I get myself correct in the lobby of the Eagle and swipe at the permanent sleeplessness in my reddened eyes, I suspect that this November shiver is bigger than just next week's election. It's an existential shiver. After all the sacrifices I've made, people I've disappointed, laws we may have broken, and maybe a lost election, is this all there is? Just what did I trade in my meager decency for? On the morning of Thanksgiving, or rather, "Feast Day," because Mack decided Passage Rouge would not honor the colonialist origins of the holiday, the people of our midsized reservation line up along Peace Pipe Road, the main drag in town. They're in good spirits because we're handing out the annual per capita checks--two G's, double the usual amount, thanks to our last-minute raid on the general fund. Credit cards and overdue rents are about to be paid off, used cars and Christmas gifts are about to be bought, and on top of this, the first fifty tribal citizens in line get a free meal and a $20 casino voucher for a couple of spins inside. Are we buying votes or delivering on promises? Depends on whose camp you're in. I watch our constituents from the window of the Migizi Suite on the top floor of the four-story hotel, and Mack sees them too, a wary, contemptuous look clouding the usually ursine friendliness of his face. He's going down there to dole out meals, hand out per capita checks, and remind them that in a week, they're going to vote and they better make the right choice, although it's possible--even probable--that these same people will vote for Gloria Hawkins, which has the president feeling morose this morning. He hasn't said a word to me since I've come up to the suite, so I startle when he croaks, "Where the hell's Bobby Lone Eagle?" He's referring to our chief of police, who's fetching the president's ride, the Big Chief, from the car wash in town. "He's on his way. Wasn't gonna make you walk your ass over there." "I just don't want to be waiting on him at the valet stand with my hands in my pockets. Wouldn't be a good look , right, Cuz?" We're not really cousins in the literal sense. We are not related. Cuz is a name to keep me close, to make me feel like we are bound together by something other than our jobs, our office, our ambitions. We are family in our deeds. Our conspiracy. And maybe it's his way of reminding me that if we're going down, we're going together. I grunt in the affirmative and gently prod him over toward the door to get him moving. On our way out, he stops to check himself in the full-length mirror at the door, smooth down the whiskers, tug the front of his ribbon shirt to get it to drape just right. We get into the elevator, his breath whistling through the hairs in his nose. He's white-knuckling a hangover, but when the elevator doors open up to the Golden Eagle's gaming floor, he has willed himself sober, wearing a dreamy half-smile. There's a word for him, and that word is massive --he is a solid mass. Growing up, he was tall and skinny, but now he is tall and massive--not fat, not muscular, just massive. Covering this mass like a tarp is a satin shirt trimmed with blue and red ribbon, embroidered with flowers and vines. A beadwork thunderbird medallion as big as a teacup saucer dances a soft two-step along his massive chest as he walks through the casino. A flat-brimmed Washington Nationals hat sits on his head just a little off-center, and underneath, his hair is woven into a tight, long braid that lands in the middle of his massive back. It doesn't matter what they say about him in private--all the sniping, all the whispers. The gold-uniformed dealers and pit bosses stand at attention when they see him, and he nods at them as they tend to the twenty-four-hour churn of cards and chips. He can relax here. He can be himself. He lives upstairs. His gravitational wake pulls me along with him into the casino. Bobby Lone Eagle, the chief of police and--let's not forget, because I haven't--one of my childhood tormentors, intercepts us at the mouth of the double row of blackjack tables in the grand atrium. Mack gives him a fist bump and Bobby falls in with us, and we set out for the golden doors that lead to the valet stand. That's where our former tribal president and current shadow advisor Buzz Carlisle waits for us, making a big show of tapping the face of his Rolex to remind us that Indian time ain't gonna cut it today. Our people are waiting in the cold for their checks. We see him, but that doesn't make Mack walk any faster. We may have been good sports and kept him on as a consultant to preserve institutional knowledge, all that--no sense throwing out the pilot after hijacking the plane, right?--but he sure as hell acts like he's still the boss. I guess after you've been tribal president for two decades, it's hard to let go of the power. Get your asses in gear , he's saying. He needs to teach us kids a few things, like the importance of punctuality. But we're fast learners, aren't we? For instance, we learned in the last go-round that if you want to be chief and your name isn't Arnault or Cota, you put on your piously traditional Indian persona and get your ass in front of the electorate and speak with a serious and measured tone about the need to go back to the old traditional ways, to rediscover the language of our ancestors, to build our nation to provide for the next seven generations of ancestors to come. You shake some hands and learn some names and make it rain for the right people at the right time. This work doesn't happen on the gaming floor. Sure, on this Feast Day morning, there's no drought of gamblers leashed to their nine-line machines with their loyalty cards tracking their compulsions, inhaling Newports and exhaling gossip between slot spins. These are not our voters. The people most likely to actually vote await us outside the doors of the William R. Paulson Tribal Government Center, cold and hungry for their checks and free meals, which will be handed to them by their tribal president. I may run the operation, but I'm meant to be invisible, to blend in. Mack, however, must dominate the room, and watching him never fails to fill my ears with that pleasing electric hum, the low-frequency rumble of power. Our grip on that power is shaky now, but we aren't dead quite yet. Furtive glances shoot through our bones like gamma radiation as we parade across the gaming floor. He smiles at people who recognize him, his head tucked down in rehearsed humility. He is a head taller than anyone else, which is probably not true but feels true. Hands come out of nowhere and reach up and slap him on the shoulder. He turns his head slightly to acknowledge them. We walk down the double row of blackjack tables underneath the ornate dome, its rim decorated with the silhouettes of our Anishinaabe ancestors and chimokomonaag traders meeting together in brotherhood to sign the treaty of La Pointe, and when one of those silhouettes moves, I realize I'm looking at a janitor with a vacuum cleaner strapped to his back. I know him. We paid for his mother's wheelchair ramp because we look out for our people. With his free hand, the janitor waves at the president, but I'm the only one who catches it, and the sight of that silhouette cleaning up after the other silhouettes chills me like a blast of air-conditioning, and I lag after the entourage until the president turns around and notices I'm a few paces behind him. I can see him talking at me, but I don't quite hear it over the electric dissonance of 250 video slot machines chiming at once, so he repeats himself: "You okay, Cuz? You got that look on your face." "Don't worry about my face," I say, more testily than I mean to. He pauses for a moment, takes too long to think of something smart to say, but he's got nothing. He keeps moving down the aisle. The casino is staffed by the recipients of the largesse we've bestowed on the people of Passage Rouge. There's Tara Pochette, disinterestedly counting twenties behind the cashier's cage in her gold uniform. Didn't I grease the tribal housing authority to find her a new place after her husband almost ran her down in his truck outside the little HUD home she shared with her daughter? I did. And didn't I lean on the head of personnel to get a sit-down job in the security room for Darrel "Petey" Pederson, who lost a chunk of his lower leg and his right foot in an ambush in the Anbar Province but now watches over all of us from the eyes in the sky? I did that too. I could go on. We've doled out these favors, hoping the word gets around that we're here for the people. We care. If Mack were running against a replacement-level candidate, some high school dropout with a big mouth and the ability to scribble their name on the tribal election form, reelection would be a slam dunk. But we're running against Gloria Hawkins, Indian Country celebrity, or whatever passes as one. Perpetual granola party candidate, activist, best-selling memoirist, and go-to talking head pundit on Indian issues. This year, instead of running her usual stunt campaign for governor, she's gotten it into her head that tribal president is less of a reach. She's not wrong. We arrive at the big golden doors of the casino and assemble next to the valet stand. The president needs to make an entrance, and he must come correct. A Ford Super Duty F-350--extended club cab, ice-white exterior, bulletproof tinted glass--idles in its haze of diesel exhaust. The president does a walk-around. Bobby has just brought the Big Chief back from the car wash, but the ride from town has splattered the bumpers with sleet and road salt. Mack silently points them out, and Bobby kneels next to the truck like he's whispering to it and rubs a chamois cloth over the white steel, stopping to give a last polish to the tribal license plate to make sure everyone can read the gleaming red letters: BGCHIEF. Only then does the president heave open his door and climb into the passenger seat. Buzz and Bobby and I get in after him, and Bobby guns the engine loud and whips out of the parking lot and onto the main road so we can cruise down Peace Pipe to be seen. It's not far, just a minute of drive time over to the Government Center, where Bobby beep-beeps and the people in line all turn and wave as we drive by at ten miles an hour like we're running a deer. The president sticks his paw through the half-open window to acknowledge our people as we pass. When the Big Chief rolls to a stop at the front of the line, the president pushes open his armored door and steps down from the truck to a smattering of mitten-muffled applause. Buzz guides him to the folding tables under the tent near the front door. The president tries to smile in the sunlight, but it's clearly blinding his raw eyes. He's almost closing them to hide the redness. It's hard to tell if people are happy to see him or if they know they'll be getting their per capita checks shortly, but we'll tamp down our doubts and ride any goodwill as far as it will take us. There was a protest here as recently as an hour ago. I had to call up Bobby to move them along as politely as possible so they wouldn't sour the good mood. It was nothing serious, just ten or so disgruntled Passage Rouge citizens shuffling listless circles around a drum. Bobby and his boys told them to take it on to the back of the Government Center, which they did. No blood was shed and no feelings were hurt, but we know they're still there with their drum and their resentments. We just can't hear them over the noise of our people, eagerly chatting and waiting on their per capita checks. At the appointed time, just when that eager commotion threatens to turn salty, Bobby escorts the first people in line to the folding tables, and as they file past us, we hand out turkey dinners in Styrofoam clamshells to our people. The president, standing tall with his flat-brimmed cap askew, lording over the asphalt tundra like a mountain, beckons our people toward their bounty of dry turkey breast and wild rice stuffing. I work the back line, handing the president boxes. Birdie Johns--one of the aunties who runs the painstaking, mundane business of the tribe--sits at a folding table in her parka, marks off names on her list, and hands out checks from a metal cashbox. This is the kind of event that brings out the best in the president. Face-to-face with our people. He likes playing the nice guy. I don't know, maybe he really is nice. A little late in the game, sure, but we're doing something unambiguously good, which is a goddamn miracle in tribal politics. Never mind the squad cars and the surplus armored vehicle, the MRAP, lined up on the street, or Bobby Lone Eagle and the rest of Passage Rouge's finest in riot gear, checking IDs for bench warrants, hassling anybody who looks like they've drifted over from the sad protest going on in the back. But just as I'm starting to feel good, a stiff wind whips up all the way over from Ogema Lake, blowing a glassy mist across the casino parking lot and lobbing tiny shards of ice over Peace Pipe, stinging my face. I turn my head away from the mist, and I see them, the people of Passage Rouge all lined up down Peace Pipe, laughing and happy, about to be flush with per cap money, and the sight makes me slump to the pavement and prop myself up against the brick wall of the Government Center. My arms and legs are seizing up. The voices and the laughter and holiday cheer fade as a tremor travels down my spine and settles in the area around my heart. Nobody seems to notice, though, and the gold-uniformed casino workers who have been dragooned into this volunteer work pick up my slack. But Mack knows. He glances at me and sees me sitting against the wall, with a slight look of--what? Contempt? Ridicule? But before anyone else notices, he quickly turns and beams that ursine friendly smile on the people in line, and I slowly reclaim my limbs and go back to handing him boxed meals and pretending that everything is fine. Weakness is a bad look this late in an election, especially one that we're already losing, and if he senses my weakness, he will begin to doubt. We jet when the line starts spacing out, a tactical retreat before we're the last ones left in the parking lot. Mack waves both of his arms over his head to say good-bye to them, and there's a muted applause as Bobby pulls the Big Chief up and beeps the truck horn. We all climb in. We're going back to the Golden Eagle. Buzz pats him on the shoulder from the back seat. "I tried to tell you, son," he says, "the Santa suit would have been a big hit." But the president is not in the mood to joke around. He's silent on the drive back, and I can't tell if he's fuming over the waste of his time and resources, or the pomposity of our entrance with the Chief. Either way, he's blaming me. I told him to do it. I told him it was a good look. Now it feels ridiculous and foolish. We drive around to the back of the hotel complex, park at the service doors, and climb down from the Chief. Mack resumes his early-morning hangover posture, carefully lurching forward to keep his head steady. Buzz gives me a wary look, and I follow him in. Sometimes taking the service route cheers up the president. Seeing the cashiers with their boxes going in and out of the cage, or soaking up the factory-like atmosphere of dealers and servers and pit bosses and shift supervisors reassures him of a reality that we've both invested time and resources in to ensure our political survival: that he and he alone is in command of this domain. The truth is that in five days, Passage Rouge is going to vote. It's my job to move a small but significant number of defectors back to our side. Checks and warm meals and goodwill might bring a few dozen back our way, but the rest will have to come from somewhere else, by means that he can't be too aware of. Things that only I can do. Excerpted from Big Chief by Jon Hickey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
