Resisting Translation and Tomson Highway’s Rez Cycle Plays: Building Community Through Cree Language in The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing

Inclusion of non-colonial language in theatre spaces is just one of the tools Indigenous playwrights can wield as a tool to make space for the inclusion of Indigenous voices. The Cree playwright Tomson Highway also uses this technique to build resistance. Highway, whose first language was Cree, includes his traditional language throughout his Rez Cycle plays, <em>The Rez Sisters</em> (1986) and <em>Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing</em> (1989), as a form of resistance against the colonial erasure of traditional Indigenous languages. Reading these plays can be a jarring experience for non-Indigenous readers, as Highway refuses to include in-text translations for his Cree dialogue, much like how the performance would be experienced for a non-Indigenous audience. While Highway includes translations in foot notes or post-text appendices, this highlights the important questions of audience, inclusivity, and translation. This article uses a methodological lens I have developed called Critical Dispositioning, which is specifically designed to facilitate ethical engagement with Indigenous texts by settler-scholars. This article will explore Highway’s selective use of translation in his published plays (and rejection of it on stage) as a way of building community and highlight the ways in which Indigenous Theatre functions as a space of Indigenous resistance.