There's another alternative for my Tiki protagonist.
Basically, the narrow orange slice of intersection between Tiki and pulp SF is mostly unexplored. If there is a bridge, though, it passes through Pulp Noir.
And both Pulp Noir and Tiki seem to lean towards that particular sort of cynical but good-hearted, knight in tarnished armor, older man. Tiki is a drinking culture of people who have made a comfortable enough middle class to need it...and to long of a beach bum existence, relaxing in a lounge chair staring out to see with the ice slowly melting in their drink.
Which is Travis McGee and maybe that's what led me to the connection. On the other side, you could perhaps name Commodore Grimes but that's the thing; the SF pulp may have its share of cynical heroes but the trend is strong towards heroes in the prime of their lives.
(Which, well, what Travis was until he ran out of primary colors.)
Thing of it is, the beach bum persona, or the equivalent in the slightly-over-the-hill merchant captain, someone with a failed Navy career, a messy divorce and a long flirtation with demon rum in his background, is also a fun character to throw into the kind of situations I envisioned. When he gets told by aggressively ambitious middle-management that he is "One of us" and will happily throw his quaint native friends under the space-bus to make a tidy profit of his own, he will be more than a little bemused.
And when said locals start seeing him as a hero he is equally non-plussed. So it works. And it also would give me a voice that could interrogate colonialism and racism not through waving the representation card but through being a flawed human being who can sympathize but also understand just how short his sympathies and his understanding falls.
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