Chief Patrick Michell

Chief Patrick Michell of the Kanaka Bar Indian Band has lived in BC’s Fraser Canyon all his life and has worked with his community to establish foundational stability in air, water, food, and shelter with supporting resilient systems like storage, energy, communications, and transportation; for the environment and economy of today and more importantly - tomorrow. Chief Patrick was recently honored with a Clean50 Lifetime Achievement Award and Kanaka’s Community Resilience Plan (2021) was also recognized as the Clean50 2022 Top project.

Site specific climate change impacts have been observed for some time at Kanaka and in response – the community completely changed its planning, investment, and implementation processes to ensure stability and resilience in core physiological areas to ensure that Kanaka’s future generations will have the same as – if not more, opportunity than we do today. On June 30, 2021, a fire completely devastated over 90% of the nearby Village of Lytton, directly and indirectly impacted surrounding Indian reserve lands and the regional districts fee simple residents. Chief Patrick and his community are engaged and are assisting the Lytton people in short term recovery and medium- and long-term rebuild.