Dear Steve,
I am teaching a course called Storytelling this Spring that has a section on the colonial-indigenous encounter and have been trying to find good novels that rely on 'Native' and 'going Native' tropes that can illuminate the contiengency of cultural identity in highly charged moments of social encounter.
I highly recommend these three:
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe; Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M Coetzee; and The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa.
I would love it to learn about more of these sorts of titles. It always nice to let those who are truly succesful writers give us insights on methods of character construction (a process we academics do too often without thinking of what we are bringing to it).
chris matthews