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WORK TITLE: Big Chief
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.jonvhickey.com/
CITY: San Francisco
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:Graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Cornell University, MFA.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has worked as a full-time parent and as an in-home care provider for developmentally disabled people.
AWARDS:Stegner Fellow, Stanford University.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to numerous publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and the Massachusetts Review.
SIDELIGHTS
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Jon Hickey is a San Francisco-based writer who earned an MFA from Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He is a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians (Anishinaabe), and he used his experiences growing up among the tribe in Minnesota as the inspiration for his debut novel.
Big Chief is a book about a fictional tribe called the Passage Rouge Nation, which is based in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. Mitch Caddo, the story’s narrator, is a law school graduate who helps run the tribe’s casino and hotel and supports his friend, the corrupt tribal president Mack Beck. Mack is running for reelection against the activist and politician Gloria Hawkins, who is assisted by Layla Beck. Not only is Layla Mack’s estranged sister, she is also Mitch’s former girlfriend. The story explores how, over the course of one week, family and tribal relationships are affected by a bruising political campaign, especially as things teeter on the precipice of violence.
In the Washington Post, Sophia Nguyen called the book “ambitious” and “sly.” She noted how it has a “pitiless eye for how identity gets deployed” along with a “series of set pieces that feel ready-made for a streaming miniseries.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly praised the book as a “fresh take on the political novel.” They wrote, “There’s a great deal of satisfaction in watching Hickey gradually peel back the layers of Mitch’s ambition.” A contributor in Kirkus Reviews called the novel a “big-minded book about small-town politics.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2025, review of Big Chief.
New York Times [Digital Edition], April 10, 2025, Christopher Sorrentino, “All Politics Is Local. In This Novel, It’s Incestuous,” review of Big Chief.
Publishers Weekly, February 17, 2025, review of Big Chief, p. 29.
Washington Post, April 23, 2025, Sophia Nguyen, “‘Big Chief’ Is a Sly Debut about Drama in Native American Politics,” review of Big Chief.
ONLINE
Jon Hickey website, https://www.jonvhickey.com/ (October 21, 2025).
Massachusetts Review, https://www.massreview.org/ (January 25, 2021), Edward Clifford, author interview.
Wisconsin Public Radio, https://www.wpr.org/ (June 12, 2025), Beatrice Lawrence, author interview.
Jon Hickey is a writer from Minnesota. He earned an MFA from Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. His short stories have appeared in numerous journals such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and the Massachusetts Review, among other places.
He is a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Chippewa Indians (Anishinaabe). He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.
10 Questions for Jon Hickey
January 25, 2021 - By Edward Clifford
This all happened in one of those good stretches of years, a time I like to call Pax Smiley. It wasn't as bad as the Navy, or the six years I spent at Lino Lakes and various country lockups across the state of Wisconsin. I had that house at the end of Sugar Bush Lane, three big dogs, dish satellite TV, two DVD players, a newish truck of foreign import, and the time to drive far and wide around the state, visiting my people.
—from "Earth Shaker," Volume 61, Issue 4 (Winter 2020)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was eleven, I wrote a play using my grandfather’s Olympic typewriter in the clamshell case. I wrote the play to make money—my brother and I charged a dime from the neighborhood kids for our performance. We pushed around our Terminator and Dick Tracy action figures on an Igloo cooler stage and read the lines off the script. The reviews were less than spectacular and we had to give back many of the dimes we made at the box office, and I didn’t write anything for a long time after that.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Ralph Ellison, Robert Penn Warren, Edith Wharton, Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Toni Morrison, Richard Yates.
What other professions have you worked in?
I went to grad school, and after that I was a Stegner Fellow for a couple of years. I taught some classes and took on various academic gigs, and when my son was born, I became a full-time parent. Before all of that, I worked as an in-home care provider for developmentally disabled people, and as a shuttle driver for a hotel.
What inspired you to write this piece?
I was inspired by misspent time with storytellers of dubious credibility.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I have a few places that feel charged in my imagination: Downtown Milwaukee in the mid-80s. The Lac du Flambeau reservation, driving around with my grandparents in a blue Pontiac Bonneville in 1988. Minneapolis and the University of Wisconsin in the 90s.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I don’t listen to music while I write, but I do have certain songs that prepare me to get into specific scenes. Lately the playlist is mostly songs you might hear on country or classic rock radio while driving through rural Wisconsin in the early 90s: Ronnie Milsap, Neil Young, Dwight Yoakam, the Rolling Stones.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I try to get the words down as early in the day as possible, and sometimes I get a few words in right before bed. However, my 4-year-old son dictates when and how I write, especially since he’s become more articulate. Someone has to make the Brio trains run on time. So I write whenever the boss isn’t looking.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I’d be a songwriter. I’ve played guitar and studied music since I was twelve years old, but the ability to play and the ability to compose are obviously different things. I never wrote enough songs to feel comfortable using that voice. There were also those wild swings between the elation of a good performance and the depression of a bad performance. That said, whenever the writing is going a little slow, I always turn back to music. I still aspire to write a couple of songs I can be proud of.
What are you working on currently?
I’m finishing a novel about politics, power, and corruption on a small Indian reservation in Wisconsin in the era of disinformation and autocracy.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading The Redshirt by Corey Sobel, Kelli Jo Ford’s amazing Crooked Hallelujah, and I’m looking forward to Brandon Hobson’s The Removed. I’m also rereading Moby Dick and All the King’s Men.
JON HICKEY lives with his wife and son in San Francisco. His work has appeared in the Madson Review, Meridian, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Gulf Coast. He received his MFA from Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He is a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians (Anishinaabe).
Jon Hickey explores belonging and tribal politics in debut novel, ‘Big Chief’
The book depicts a fictional Anishinaabe tribe in Wisconsin in the lead-up to an especially tense tribal election
By Beatrice Lawrence
June 12, 2025
Updated June 17, 2025 at 11:26 am
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A person wearing a black cap and a black San Francisco Giants hoodie sits on a boat with a calm lake and green trees in the background.
Author Jon Hickey visiting Lac du Flambeau, Wis. in 2022. Photo courtesy Jon Hickey
In Jon Hickey’s debut novel “Big Chief,” members of a tribal community fight amongst themselves for political power in the days leading up to an especially tense election for tribal president.
The story takes place inside a fictional, tight-knit Anishinaabe tribe in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, called the Passage Rouge Nation. It’s inspired by real tribes in Minnesota and Wisconsin, particularly Hickey’s own tribal community: the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
The book’s narrator is Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate who runs the tribal government alongside his childhood friend and current tribal president Mack Beck. As the election draws near, Mitch and his opponents try to sway the voters of the Passage Rouge Nation — by any means necessary.
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In an interview with WPR’s “Wisconsin Today,” Hickey, a University of Wisconsin-Madison alum, said it wasn’t easy writing about the nuances of tribal politics, especially because it was inspired by his own tribal community. He was worried about how the book would be received — whether he was going to get called out for getting something “completely wrong.” Instead, people embraced the story.
“It’s been really great to have these people show up at the readings to tell me that they found something that they identified with, or that they were happy that this story had been written because they don’t see it otherwise,” Hickey said. “I think that that’s made me feel a little bit closer to the people [of Lac du Flambeau].”
Hickey discussed the themes and current issues he tackles in his new novel.
A woman stands beside a green pickup truck decorated with tree branches and signs for an event, with two people sitting in the truck bed.
Author Jon Hickey with his brother and grandmother in Lac du Flambeau, Wis. in 1989. Photo courtesy Jon Hickey
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kate Archer Kent: One of the central themes of the book is belonging. You write about banishment, disenrollment and blood quantum — ways that tribes decide who gets to be a part of the community and who is rejected. How do you make this type of belonging a central tension of the book?
Jon Hickey: I was always writing about belonging in my previous short stories and novel attempts. When I came across tribal politics as a subject, this was the central place where identity and belonging is defined and codified in official terms. Blood quantum and enrollment is such a heated issue, and it cuts right to the bone, because it defines who you are and how you belong to a people. When I was doing my research and I was encountering these things about disenrollment and banishment, it struck me that this was as close as you can get to harming somebody’s sense of themselves.
KAK: Mitch Caddo is fresh out of law school, he runs this casino on the reservation and he’s also running this reelection campaign for his childhood friend, Mack. You label him in some parts of the book as the “J. Crew Indian.” Why does Mitch take on this job?
JH: In the beginning of the book, he’s doing a lot of the day-to-day, boring side of the governance work, while Mack gets to be a sort of figurehead, a symbol. And in that way, [Mitch] feels like this is his way of insinuating himself back into the community that he feels somewhat estranged by, because he is an outsider. He left the reservation. He is seen as somebody who is different for many reasons: visually, the way that he talks, the fact that he spent so much time away from Passage Rouge.
Book cover for Big Chief: A Novel by Jon Hickey, featuring bold geometric text, a bear, a bird, a feather, and card suit symbols in orange, black, and green.
Cover photo courtesy Simon & Schuster
KAK: Is there a character you like the most in this book or a character who evolved and you now gravitate towards?
JH: Mack was one of the biggest surprises to me as I wrote these drafts, because he was not a central character in the very first draft of this. He started getting a little bit more time in scenes with each revision. At a certain point, I was realizing that, as the writer, I was calling him in to liven up the scene. And I was like, “Wow, this guy seems more like the main character here.” And of course, once I let him in a little bit, Mack just completely took over.
The more that I learned about him, the more I was just fascinated by how you have this character who is kind of a bomb thrower — he delights in trolling people a little bit. But he’s also got these very strong griefs that he hasn’t gotten over. And you realize that, to some extent, the things that he’s doing are meant to address these wounds that he’s carrying around.
KAK: You write about the cold and the snow, and that chronic shiver that follows Mitch Caddo throughout the book. There’s the contrast, though, with images of fire. What do those two elements mean thematically?
JH: We could draw some easy conclusions that the fire is the warmth of family and love, and the cold is the rejection of the same. Writing from such a distance [in San Francisco], a lot of this for me was re-experiencing what it felt like to live in a place like Wisconsin or Minnesota, up north. And dealing with a subject that has a lot of extremes — political extremes, extremes of violence — I was drawn to these descriptions of extreme cold and extreme heat.
Jon Hickey’s book imagines a cutthroat campaign for control of a Native American reservation.
BIG CHIEF,by Jon Hickey
Mitch Caddo, the narrator of Jon Hickey’s debut novel, “Big Chief,” introduces himself with a summary of his LinkedIn profile: tribal operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe, chief operations officer of the reservation casino, legislative liaison, Cornell Law J.D. and all-around whiz kid.
In fact, though, Mitch, a 30-year-old “white-passing” mixed-race Indian, has his hands full propping up the tribal president, Mack Beck, who faces an uphill re-election battle. Voted in two years earlier because he “looked the part” with his ribbon shirts, thunderbird medallion, long braid and reservation cred — and also because the incumbent failed to obtain enough propane for the tribe as an Upper Midwest winter set in — Mack is an incompetent and vindictive alcoholic. He’s also a patronage politician who dips into the general fund to pad distributions to tribal citizens and freely banishes troublemakers and political opponents from the reservation.
Part chief of staff, part campaign director and part hatchet man, Mitch operates in the background, ambivalently overseeing “the quiet, permanent tragedy of Passage Rouge,” a community of 5,000 stricken by poverty, addiction, inadequate housing, corruption and police brutality.
Unfolding over the week preceding the election, the novel concerns which of the two opposing camps can secure electoral victory by most cynically leveraging the chronically bad news emanating from Passage Rouge. While Mack is a disaster for the tribe, his rival, Gloria Hawkins — a polished activist and perennial third-party gubernatorial also-ran — scarcely inspires more confidence.
Gloria is backed by Joe Beck, the tribe’s Boston Brahmin but Indian-fetishizing general counsel, who lives on an opulent lakeside compound within the reservation. He’s also Mitch’s mentor and benefactor, and the adoptive father of Mack, from whom he is estranged, and Mack’s sister, Layla. Additional thickeners to the plot include the fact that Layla, who is divorced from Mack’s thuggish police chief, Bobby Lone Eagle, also works for Gloria, and years before had a fling with the Cornell-bound Mitch. If all politics is local, Passage Rouge’s politics is positively incestuous. When Joe is implicated in financial misdeeds connected to land deals conducted on the tribe’s behalf, Mack seizes upon the news to banish Joe from the reservation, a symbolic patricide also intended to damage Gloria’s campaign. Things rapidly go downhill for everyone from there.
“Big Chief” maintains a tight time frame, with each of its sections, apart from a brief postscript, devoted to a single day. This helps keep the book on the rails, given the numerous characters and events that fill its pages. Activists, council members, medicine men, tribal elders, cops, F.B.I. agents, ghosts and others strut and fret their hour upon the stage in a compact saga containing demonstrations, political skulduggery, family rifts, the arrival of federal investigators, betrayals, a fiery plane crash, an old flame rekindled, a police shooting, a narrow escape from death, a riot and multiple flashbacks.
Such events drive the narrative forward, but despite the sound and fury, the novel has a strangely vacant center. This is not inadvertent. As a protagonist, Mitch is pretty elusive by design, uncertain of his own motives, desires and objectives. Raised largely off the reservation and long absent while attending college and law school, Mitch is an outsider who experiences alienation wherever he is, but most acutely among “his” people, who mock him as a “J. Crew Indian.” Lacking friends, family and a set of clear principles, he’s one of Eliot’s “hollow men,” never sure what he’s doing in Passage Rouge or why he persists in the dutifully unscrupulous performance of his role as Mack’s fixer.
Hickey’s writing can be workmanlike, even awkward. A character’s “expression looks annoyed at the wind blowing her hair sideways.” An envelope is “thrumming with an electrical pulse.” A car sits “idling a lazy curl of thick exhaust that dances.” Mack is described as “ursine” seven times, by my count.
But about two-thirds of the way through, Buzz, the former tribal president, tells Mitch a story about leading a captured deer into the middle of a house party, where it wreaks havoc among the drunken revelers before it is shot. It’s a wonderful set piece: unexpected, disturbingly funny, the vernacular stylized with the lightest touch — the sort of work that betokens genuine talent, with the promise of more to come.
For the most part, “Big Chief” cultivates an uneasy atmosphere. Full of cagey, terse, veiled exchanges between people bound together by self-interest who do not seem to like or trust each other much, it creates suspense not from the question of whether open conflict will take place, but when. A new boss, it suggests, will be the same as the old. The message, if the book can be said to offer one, is subtle: Unsparing of them as “Big Chief” is, its movers and shakers have been “working with the wrong tools” imposed by a colonizing force uninterested in Anishinaabe culture. It is “an affliction,” Mitch observes. And “if there’s a medicine for it,” he adds, “it still eludes me.”
BIG CHIEF | By Jon Hickey | Simon & Schuster | 308 pp. | $28.99
PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Cristina Daura FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)Cristina Daura
PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Cristina Daura FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/
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Sorrentino, Christopher. "All Politics Is Local. In This Novel, It’s Incestuous." New York Times [Digital Edition], 10 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836640763/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6f35fa24. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.
Big Chief
By Jon Hickey
Simon & Schuster. 308 pp. $28.99
- - -
My digital review copy of "Big Chief," Jon Hickey's ambitious debut novel, came with a letter attached. In it, Hickey introduces himself as an enrolled citizen of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Chippewa Indians who grew up away from his ancestral homeland in northern Wisconsin after his grandparents were forcibly relocated to Chicago. The novel emerged from the experience of feeling estranged from his roots, as well as his observations of Indigenous politics. The letter was earnest and direct, neatly unspooling the author's ties to his material.
It was also a stark mismatch for the novel itself, which is cynical and sly, with a pitiless eye for how identity gets deployed. We open in a snowy corner of Wisconsin on Feast Day - the characters keep slipping up and calling it Thanksgiving - and Mitch Caddo is eating dry turkey with his boyhood friend Mack Beck. Mack holds the title of tribal president on the Passage Rouge Reservation; Mitch is his consigliere, who actually runs the government and casino. He is "the suit and tie, the short haircut, the white-passing face of Passage Rouge" to the state politicians and federal bureaucrats they work with. In his partnership with Mack, Mitch says, "He is the look. I'm the substance."
Mack is up for reelection, and less than a week before Election Day, morale is poisonously low. He and Mitch came into office as the change candidates, but two years later, the reservation is still riven by open corruption and opioid addiction. Mack slouches toward certain defeat. Mitch is reaching deep into his fixer's bag of dirty tricks: bribing teens to steal the opposition's yard signs, posting anonymous rumors about the other candidate's blood quantum, erasing inconvenient people from the tribal rolls. Here, "belonging" isn't a squishy emotional state; it determines who gets housing, who gets a lighter jail sentence, who gets their per capita check. Is it foul play to banish troublemakers - or the defining right of a sovereign nation? Mitch is equivocal. Call it a traditional practice, he says sardonically.
Passage Rouge is small and tight-knit, so the election gets tangled up in family drama. Joe Beck - Mitch's mentor, Mack's adoptive father, a White savior par excellence and the tribe's longtime general counsel - is funding the other candidate, Gloria Hawkins. Mitch's late, sainted mother was herself an early supporter of Gloria. Mack's sister Layla also works for the rival campaign. (Did I mention that Layla's ex, Bobby Lone Eagle, is the brutish chief of police - and that she and Mitch have unfinished romantic business?) When evidence emerges that Joe embezzled from the tribe, Mack smells blood in the water. In this frozen place, where protest is shrugged off as seasonal recreation, the community's resentments prove surprisingly combustible.
The plot lurches through a series of set pieces that feel ready-made for a streaming miniseries: FBI agents making shady deals, a plane crash in a lonely field, an armed takeover of a government office. Hickey maintains tight control of the action - so much so that even explosive events feel muted, the players' motives hard to pin down. That's especially true of Mitch, our laconic narrator. Whether it's because he mostly grew up outside Passage Rouge, or because the best and the brightest always sleepwalk into disaster, he (and therefore the reader) remains outside the emotional blast zone.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Nguyen, Sophia. "'Big Chief' is a sly debut about drama in Native American politics." Washington Post, 23 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836869912/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8bb153e3. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.
Big Chief
Jon Hickey. Simon & Schuster, $28.99 (320p)
ISBN 978-1-6680-4646-3
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 "whitepassing 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. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Big Chief." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 7, 17 Feb. 2025, p. 29. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829933346/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=aa2860b9. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.
Hickey, Jon BIG CHIEF Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $28.99 4, 8 ISBN: 9781668046463
A fixer for a Native American tribal leader is caught in the drama of a tense election season.
Mitch Caddo, the narrator of Hickey's assured debut, is 30 years old and introduces himself as "the youngest ever tribal operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe," a Wisconsin tribe with 5,000 enrolled members. It's a step up from his previous work as a tribal attorney working family-court cases. But as the election for tribal president approaches, he's torn: He knows that his old friend Mack Beck, the current president, who's taken up residence in a suite at the local casino hotel, is an incompetent boor, and that Mack's main political strategy--banishing and disenrolling those who fall into legal trouble and effectively paying off the tribe via annual checks from the general fund--at once weakens and alienates the community. As Mitch does disreputable things on Mack's behalf, such as creating burner Facebook accounts smearing his opponent, Mitch is prompted to reconsider his past. Joe Beck, who's the tribal counsel, Mack's adoptive father, and a mentor to Mitch after his mother's death, is disappointed in the mudslinging. Mack's sister, Layla, with whom Mitch had a brief fling, is even more resentful. Keeping the timeframe tight--the story runs from Thanksgiving to the election the following Tuesday--escalates the intensity of a story that includes a plane crash, a community riot, hovering FBI agents, and a police department that's much too comfortable using military surplus equipment. But most of the tension resides within Mitch, who enters the story with plenty of swagger--"I execute the decisions of a multi-million-dollar corporation that also happens to be a sovereign nation"--while slowly recognizing the perils of his braggadocio. It's not hard to see the events in this small community as an allegory for larger themes of corruption in the Trump era, but Hickey avoids big symphonic flourishes and instead emphasizes the cost to individuals.
A big-minded book about small-town politics.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Hickey, Jon: BIG CHIEF." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832991691/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9564d095. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.