Etch A Sketch

Ei Myat San, aka. Kate, aka. Captain Kat Summers, is an aspiring writer, vocalist and Game of Thrones addict whose current goal is to survive until the next Saturday in order to meet more adoptable dogs and get a fur fix. While not extremely experienced,...

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Do Lilo and Stitch belong to a nation-state? Do they want to belong to one? 

No, Lilo and Stich both don’t belong to a nation state. This is because Lilo, while she is a rightful citizen of Hawaii, always seems to make decisions that battle the norm. For example, she does not fit in with the other girls in her dance class and when they make fun of her, she fights them even though she could have stayed quiet. However, she really wants to belong because she makes her own doll with hopes to play with said classmates and their dolls. She also adopts Stich even though he is not the most usual of dogs. Likewise, Stitch is also an outsider in his own nation-state as he is hunted down by the Galactic Federation for being an “abomination”. He too wishes to belong and identifies with the ugly duckling, trying to find his own space and ultimately does in Nani and Lilo. 

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A subtribe of the Ojibway indigenous tribe of Ontario that stuck very closely to tradition and the “good life” unlike their sister group that diverged at the river and migrated to Michigan. 

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The name of the nation of indigenous groups in the United States consisting of the Odawa, Ojibway, and Algonquin people. 

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The US Air Force facility/rumored extraterrestrial base located in Nevada is a highly secretive compound whose existence was only acknowledged by the CIA in 2005. 

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Last queen of Hawaii, overthrown by non-natives, was placed under house arrest twice after and lived out her days in Washington Place until she died of a stroke at age 79.

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Calls for Israel to “stop occupying the State of Palestine”, to integrate all Palestinians back into Palestine, and to break down the wall that separates the two nations.

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The term used to describe the displacement of Palestinians starting in the 1948 Palestinian War, also used to describe “catastrophe” or “disaster”.

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Formerly two independent parts of Palestine as Gaza broke away from Palestine but reconciled in 2014 under the State of Palestine with the leader of West Bank heading their political parties.

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Most famous work of a Palestinian cartoon artist/journalist that is a small refugee child that sees the faults of the Palestinian government.

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2070, Singapore.

I came to Singapore at the cusp of the water break down in 2063. I was only 19 at the time, living with my cousin who migrated 4 years before. Coincidentally, my first job was as a construction worker at a desalination plant, the third of its kind to allow Singapore its water independence. There were a lot of other Burmese people so the work was not as lonely nor as hard as I imagined it to be but the hours were long and involved a lot of manual labor. I didn’t speak very much English or Singlish and had to mime my way out of most things during the first few months. But it was all worth it because I only had one goal in mind: to support my family back in Irrawaddy. Not even six months at the job, everything collapsed. The second desalination plant was first to go. A few hours later, the first and the third. Some say it was the Malaysians who didn’t want to hand over their only political advantage over Singapore. Some say it was socialists. Nobody really found out who did it but a lot of people died in that first explosion. Some people were close enough to the sea and tried to swim away, some drowned that way and most were never recovered. My cousin was one of these people. For weeks, police dug through rubble and cleared the scenes and I hung around, watching them do scan the sites with some kind of x-ray gun to look for bodies. A month later, everything was chaos. The water supply was all but gone and there were riots, raids, and the only people in the way were scared 20 year old police and military officers. The convenience stores and the shopping malls were first to go.

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As tribute to the recently deceased Lee Kuan Yew, the metropole/border city of my choosing is Singapore. An interesting fact about Singapore is that it is a small island with little to no natural resources on its own. But by acting as a port, it is among the most developed cities in Asia. Its vast economic prosperity can be credited to many things such as stable politics, good infrastructure, smart investments, low-wage-low-skill migrant workers, etc. However, as a small island with near nonexistent natural resources, it has to import a lot of things such as water and sand. About 40% of Singapore’s water is imported from Malaysia as they have a water agreement but even as Singapore builds desalination plants it might not be enough for the entirety of Singapore’s water needs especially since the water agreement is set to expire on 2062. Similarly, the sand from Singapore’s beaches such as Marina Bay were imported. However, since they have started building those beaches, there has been concern because sand dredging from other countries have large environmental effects on the country of export as it can lead to ecological failures as well as landslides, floods, erosions, etc. Thus, the countries of major export to Singapore and others have been banning sand trade one after the other. Among these countries are Malaysia, Indonesia, China and even Cambodia. With this in mind, I would like to switch over to the future where I am reincarnated as one of these low-wage-low-skill migrant workers.

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In Sleep Dealer, the imagined future is very much based on reality and not so farfetched as some science fiction movies can be. For example, the drone pilots that control the drones with hand motions are based on present day motion sensor games such as the x-box 360. Couple that with present day drone technology that uses controllers and buttons then it becomes the drones in Sleep Dealer. Socioeconomic structures such as the less developed cities in Mexico are based on real life. Because it is true although cities in Mexico are more developed than rural farming communities, there is a stark contrast between them and American cities like LA and especially San Diego which the movie emphasizes even more. The ecological structure drawn from real life could be the dam and the setting in Santa Ana del Rio because it is dry land whose only source of water is the river. Many small farming communities have the same ecology such as in China, communities living beside the Yangzi or Yellow River had to relocate because of dams that the government place for hydroelectricity. 

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Creek Nation, otherwise known as Muscogee Nation, is based in the state of Oklahoma, with several tribes that fall under this category, it is the largest of the federally recognized Muscogee Tribes. The nation has its own executive, legislative and judicial branches and their own economic developmental council.

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Hitchiti is an indigenous tribe of America and also the language spoken by the Muscogee tribe during the colonial times, most often associated with Georgia and later, Alabama where they were relocated.

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After doing some research on the #occupygezi movement, this picture shows my honest impression about what an Occupy Gezi comic book would look like. First of all, it has to do with a battle of wills. People are trying to save Gezi Park from being turned into a skyscraper among other things such as prosecution of people who speak out or the censorship of media, official internet sources, the privatizing of public spaces and goods, etc. These are mostly reflected in the picture with the no TC(Republic of Turkey) showing the privatizing of banks and such, the “int*rn*t” showing censorship, the TV with the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Edrogan’s face with his thumb up showing the media covers only what the government approves.  

On the other hand, there are protests, with signs, social media and occupy tents in the park pro movement which are all shot down with tear gas, fires, bulldozers although at one point protesters gained control over a crane (POMA) and fought back against the riot police. Poma along with the “woman in red” are both among the many symbols of the movement which had an extremely large amount of traction on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. A man in a machete also started going after the protesters in the park.

 The reason I titled it ‘Try to Occupy Gezi’ is because at first I wanted something catchy like ‘Try to Occupy’ but I figured it was too vague so I put in Gezi. Why try? Because even after the months of protests and occupying the park, the government didn’t give into the demands of the people until it gave them some kind of political gain or levying power.