By Alex Nino Gheciu Pernell Bad Arm never asked to become a meme. But in the early 2010s, a photo of the First Nations man — clad in a windbreaker with his fists up in a fighter’s stance, his gaze slightly vacant — spread across the internet. Shared on message boards such as 4chan, the picture was initially used mockingly to perpetuate stereotypes of Indigenous people. “It was being shared mostly by non-Indigenous people to kind of ridicule and make fun of us,” says filmmaker Damien Eagle Bear. But Indigenous users soon reclaimed the photo, captioning it with the rez slang word “skoden” — as in “let’s go, then” — and transforming it into part meme, part rallying cry. Still, when Eagle Bear first saw the photo in 2013, his…
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