#skoden Documentary Film Review: The Man Behind the NDN Country Meme

Beginning with a light-hearted tone that introduces the Internet meme origins of the word “skoden,” the documentary #skoden then radiates outwards to encompass a larger world of mental health, alcoholism, and the traumatic legacy of residential schools that impact Canada’s Indigenous communities. At the center of the film by Blackfoot director Damien Eagle Bear is Pernell Thomas Bad Arm, a man also from his same reserve of Blood Nation, who — prior to becoming a viral sensation — lived a life fairly unnoticed other than by people in his immediate community in the small city of Lethbridge.

Lethbridge, located in the province of Alberta and with a population of just over 100,000, is a border town on the northeastern edge of the Blood (Kanai) Nation reserve. Like all border towns, Lethbridge is constantly the site of intractable social problems and misunderstandings between its Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. Using Bad Arm its main subject, #skoden explores how one man’s life can represent the microcosm in the macrocosm, and how an seemingly anonymous meme subject can be known by his family and friends as kind and humorous, even if the system failed him time and time again.

The reason Bad Arm was photographed and by who are unclear, but the viral photo featured him with his fists raised, as if he were about to fight someone. From there, the internet’s response to his perceived intoxication was both negative and positive, with racist non-Indigenous people making fun of his backwardness, and Indigenous people using it to popularize the word “skoden” through a series of playful memes and even product placements. Skoden, recently made visible to mainstream culture through the TV series Reservation Dogs, is an Indigenous play on words that means, “Let’s go then!” It represents the type of manipulation of the English language and morphing that takes place within the reservations, where English is one of the colonizer’s languages.

As it turns out, Bad Arm was the first person that documentarian Eagle Bear ever interviewed, when he was still a nascent filmmaker that had no idea what he was doing. That interview was originally part of a documentary that never saw the light of day, but it connected the Eagle Bear with Bad Arm, who was a client at Lethbridge Shelter and Resource Center (LSRC), a service-providing organization for homeless Indigenous individuals. That initial seed of an interview then weaved its way into the documentary #skoden years later, and seeing Bad Arm presented as a real human offers a fruitful way of moving his presence from a meme into a serious conversation about the ways in which mental health services fail to address the unique needs of individuals.

Deanna Vincent, Bad Arm’s previous case manager at LSRC, attests in the documentary that Parnell was constantly “victimized” due to the “well-meaning ideas” of service providers, which failed to address his unique needs and personality. In turn, they shuffled him in and out among different types of mental health service centers and the street every time he misbehaved, even when he misbehaved in exactly the ways that they predicted he might.

By all accounts, Bad Arm was a kind person who came from a kind family, even if he spent much of his life on the streets. Testimony after testimony attested to the ways in which he was never harmful or scary and was always kind — or at most, he would playfully tease others in a way that is common in Indigenous culture and humor. Bad Arm did, however, struggle immensely with alcoholism, and the film connects that trauma to the racism of Lethbridge, residential schools, and a general lack of resources to service the area’s Indigenous communities.

#skoden was first viewed at imagineNATIVE 2025 in June 2025.