#skoden — Reclaiming a Meme, Reclaiming a Life
A screening of Damien Eagle Bear’s documentary followed by a community-centred conversation about digital culture, memory, documentary ethics, and reparative storytelling.
A documentary screening and public conversation about digital culture, memory, documentary ethics, and Indigenous-led reclamation.
Through interviews, archival searching, community testimony, and on-the-ground remembering, #skoden traces the rise of the “skoden” meme while working to recover Pernell Bad Arm’s humanity from the image that circulated in his place.
Director Damien Eagle Bear refrains from reproducing the meme. Instead, the film foregrounds family, friends, community members, and the social worlds that shaped Pernell’s life in Lethbridge, while attending to the structural forces — residential school, poverty, addiction, and housing instability — that rendered him both visible and invisible.
The film asks what changes when a person made into an online symbol is returned to story, relation, grief, and community memory.