"Ride a Tin Can" (1960/1970)

“Holly Harkel and myself, Vincent Vanhoosier, received funds and permission to record the lore of the Shelni through the intercession of that old correlator John Holmberg. This was unexpected. All lorists have counted John as their worst enemy. ‘After all, we have been at great expense to record the minutiae of pig grunts and the sound of earthworms,’ Holmberg told me, ‘and we have records of squeakings of hundreds of species of orbital rodents. We have veritable libraries of the song and cackle of all birds and pseudo-ornins. Well, let us add the Shelni to our list . . . . You'll have to hurry. They're about gone.’”

The Sirionó are one of the most primitive and least numerous of the native tribes of South America. At the time of my study their total population did not exceed 150 persons. — Allan R. Holmberg, Nomads of the Long Bow: The Sirionó of Eastern Bolivia (1950)

One certainty in life is that virtues are closely connected to vices. I sometimes think of the eccentric Caryll Houselander in this regard. She once wrote that while all saints are perfected, they remain human, and that some saints would try our patience just as others would suit our disposition. Oliver Goldsmith expressed something similar: “There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.” Most of us have experienced how even a person’s greatest virtues can become irritating. As Joseph Heller wrote of the Texan in Catch-22, “The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”

Lafferty’s independent mind is a virtue-vice knot, one of his excellences, and it's a reason I get such a kick out of him. A small example: Okla Hannali is a very great book. At the same time, Lafferty once wrote a letter in which he said that, on the whole, the American government had treated the Indians pretty squarely. If someone tries to pitch Okla Hannali to you, don't expect to hear that Lafferty thought that Indian removal was fair. It can be hard to reconcile the fact that Lafferty has both Okla Hannali in him and the belief that the Devil of the Indians is part of a story that is mostly just.

Today I want to look at “Ride a Tin Can,” a story about genocide, and offer a speculative reading involving the anthropologist Allan Holmberg and what influence he may have had on Lafferty. Even if Holmberg isn’t present in the text (and I can’t prove he is, though I’ll give some reasons for thinking he might be), the story is relevant to anthropology and fits into a broader conversation. Lafferty comes out of this one looking good. First, the plot.

Our narrator is a folklorist named Vincent Vanhoosier, presenting his final notes on a very sticky business involving the near-extinct Shelni species. He and his colleague, Holly Harkel, receive unexpected funding to document the Shelni’s lore. The arrangement comes from an official named John Holmberg, who views the project with contempt. Holmberg denies that the Shelni have a real culture: “I do not believe that their thumping on tree roots or blowing into jug gourds is music. I do not believe that their singsong is speech any more than the squeaking of doors is speech.” The money for the project comes from the Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company.

Vanhoosier describes Holly as having “a heart and soul too big for her dwarfish body,” with a profound empathy that allows her to resemble the creatures she studies—both physically and spiritually. This becomes especially pronounced with the goblin-like Shelni. If Holmberg represents the extreme etic view, Holly is the far end of the emic.

Upon their arrival, Holly locates a Shelni den, and she dives "into a hole in the ground head-first, like a gopher." To Vanhoosier's surprise, she communicates with the Shelni guard through a rhyming exchange in their native frog-croak, a language she says is a form of English that "only the pure of ear can understand." The Shelni say they adopted the language because "no one had ever made one for us." Inside the den, Holly and Vanhoosier begin recording the culture of the small, childlike creatures. Music is played on jug-shaped flutes and wooden tines. It creates a haunting sound Vanhoosier describes as "underground fugues full of worms' blood and cool as root cider." And it is filled with a sorrow that seems to emanate from the earth itself.

Over two days, the two anthropologists record Shelni folk tales that reflect a deeply fatalistic worldview. One story, "The Shelni Who Lost His Burial Tooth," tells of a dead Shelni who must wander eternally because he lacks the final tooth required to pay the Skokie burial-person. Another, "The Shelni Who Turned into a Tree," is about a foundling who, feeling he doesn't belong, transforms himself into a tree that becomes the living roof of his family's den. A third story, "The Skokie Who Lost His Wife," describes a Shelni being disassembled by a creature looking for his wife's voice in the Shelni's flute music.

The project takes a turn when Holly sees an advertisement from their sponsor: "Singing Pig! The Children love it! Nourishing Novelty! . . . Real Meat from Real Goblins! No fat, no bones." The nature of the Shelni's disappearance is then recorded in a last anthropological recording, "The Singing Pigs." The Shelni believe that bell men with music carts come "for love of us" to take them on a joyous free ride. They chant "we can ride a tin can over the sky." Their last story captures a bell man’s "Hey, Ben, what other animal jumps onto the slaughter wagon when you only ring a bell?" The last recording of the Shelni will end with Vanhoosier’s note that "someday a Shelni woman will cry instead of laugh when they take her," and that she will protest, "I'm human."

Back in the frame narrative, the bell men arrive with their wagon. Holly, who Vanhoosier notes "had finally come to look like the Shelni," asks Vanhoosier, "Would it be love if they should go and I should stay?" She joins the Shelni, fulfilling the prophecy by weeping great goblin tears as she willingly boards the slaughter wagon. When Vanhoosier confronts the workers, a bell ringer callously tells him he can have her remains back, "if you can tell which ones they are." Left with Holly's bones, Vanhoosier concludes: "Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company, beware! There will be vengeance! It has been told."

Andrew Ferguson’s post on the story’s difficult publication history is worth reading. I haven’t read the original 1960 version and don’t know if it has survived. It would be interesting to see how much Lafferty changed it in the 1969 rewrite. I assume the earlier story may still exist in Virginia Kidd’s papers. One of the most difficult aspects of the story is the ambiguity around the Shelni language. Ferguson sums it up this way:

“In talking to the Shelni—already a momentous task, because of the overwhelming consensus that they have no actual language—Holly learns that the Shelni lacked a language only ‘because no one had ever made one for us.’ In providing the language for these creatures to tell stories they couldn’t otherwise, including stories of their own coming extinction, Holly Harkel acts as a precursor to such SF experimenters as Ursula Le Guin in Always Going Home, or Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue.”

I wonder about this because Lafferty is very slippery on that language point. The Shelni’s statement—“no one had ever made one for us”—can be read in at least three ways:

1. Literal deficiency: The Shelni truly lacked a language until contact with humans.

2. Metaphysical dependence: Shelni being is incomplete; they exist as unspoken goblins until someone names them.

3. Irony: The Shelni repeating what humans say about them (metafictional play)—the idea that language and culture must be bestowed by civilization.

Of course, the issue here is the besetting problem of anthropological fieldwork: reception. Can the fieldworker see the object under investigation? Ferguson’s phrasing (Holly provides the language for these creatures to tell stories they couldn’t otherwise) nixes the ambiguity. It makes Holly the linguistic liberator. Maybe Lafferty meant that. Even so, my reading would emphasize Holly as a listener, not a bestower. In the old days, the "Can the Subaltern Speak?" crowd would be all over this.

Which takes us to Allan Holmberg (1909–1966). He was an American anthropologist best known for his 1950 monograph, which documented the Sirionó people of eastern Bolivia. He earned his PhD from Yale in 1947 after conducting fieldwork among the Sirionó, and joined the Cornell faculty in 1948, where he directed the Cornell-Peru Project and other applied anthropology efforts until his death in 1966. Nomads of the Long Bow, published by the Smithsonian Institution, was his most significant work.

Holmberg’s scholarship has received severe criticism for naive assumptions about indigenous peoples, something now called “Holmberg’s Mistake.” It is hard to name an anthropologist who has taken a harder rap on the knuckles in the past thirty years.

To be a little more precise about it, Holmberg’s Mistake is a flawed assumption made that Indigenous peoples of the Americas, particularly the Sirionó of Bolivia, had long existed in an unchanging primitive state, untouched by history or civilization until European contact. In his 1950 study, Holmberg described the Sirionó as “living in a raw state of nature,” implying that the pre-Columbian Americas were sparsely populated wildernesses inhabited by simple hunter-gatherers. Later scholarship in archaeology, anthropology, and environmental history overturned this view, showing that Indigenous societies had developed complex political systems, agriculture, urban centers, and sophisticated landscape management long before Europeans arrived. The term “Holmberg’s Mistake,” popularized by Charles C. Mann in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, now stands as a cautionary example of how Eurocentric bias can distort one’s understanding of Indigenous history and agency.

And this is where Allan Holmberg might matter to the story. He was precisely the kind of figure Lafferty would have read, and if the fictional Holmberg in "Ride a Tin Can" points to the real one, then Lafferty had his number well before the anthropological community did.

"Ride a Tin Can" reads as a correction of Holmberg’s style if not his mistake. Like the Sirionó, the Shelni are without history. Lafferty writes, "there are no Shelni remains going back more than about thirty equivalent years. There are no random lying or fossil Shelni at all, though such remains are common for every other species here." Of the Sirionó, Allen Holmberg wrote,

“The Siriono are an anomaly in eastern Bolivia. Widely scattered in isolated pockets of forest land, with a culture strikingly backward in contrast to that of their neighbors, they are probably a remnant of an ancient population that was exterminated, absorbed or engulfed by more-civilized invaders.”

Lafferty’s scientist John Holmberg displays ethnographic blindness when he dismisses the Shelni’s singsong as no more than the squeaking of doors.

“I do not believe that their singsong is speech any more than the squeaking of doors is speech. We have recorded, by the way, the sound of more than thirty thousand squeaking doors. And we have had worse. Let us have the Shelni, then, if your hearts are set on it. You'll have to hurry. They're about gone.”

Lafferty makes this moral satire: the refusal to recognize intelligence and language becomes a rationalization for extermination. The fictional Holmberg’s ethnography enables genocide. The Shelni are industrially processed into canned food. His ethnographic blindness becomes an allegory about how scientific objectivity and bureaucratic detachment can erase the very humanity being studied.

In "Ride a Tin Can," it looks to me like Lafferty kit-bashed the kind of writing he found in Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians, a book he drew deeply from many times, and combined it with Holmberg’s ethnographic insensitivity.

I’ll end with a passage from Holmberg to be read alongside the burial customs of the Shelni:

Ride a Tin Can Notes.pdf

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