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Dr. Irving Pascal is a true Nature Islander not just a Dominican. A Dominican can be anyone who buys a passport or is born on Dominica. Dominica is a legal construct; a member of the Commonwealth and the United Nations. The Nature Isle is a cultural fortress and consciousness born of freedom struggle, and a commitment to Koudmen and the collaborative ethic that understands, respects and preserves nature’s bounty on our island for the benefit of its people and humanity yet unborn.
A Nature Islander is one born of our island, or who has embraced our culture of Koudmen, conservation and love of our freedom loving culture at harmony with nature. This is a meditation born of a reasoning with Dr. Pascal with whom I spent many days in the 1970s Zion of the Dominica Government Stock Farm above our home at Didier Lane. It was a naturalist awakening era germinated by independence struggle and Rastafarian philosophy. We grew up amidst the natural splendor of a stock farm now extinct. A place where luxuriant soursop, glory cedar and mango trees served as windbreaks for the meadows of alfalfa and other beneficial grass planted to feed herds of holstein and zebu cattle – the milk from which fed electric milking machines in the well kept milkery barn. A farm where a fish pond teeming with tilapia gave way to little streams within which swam little guppies and other marine life that buttressed our Nature Isle and birthed an enduring love for our island and its people.
The Institutional Setting of Koudmen
We are the inheritors of institutions—some formal, some organic, some born of resistance, others of discipline—and together they shaped the moral architecture of Dominica. From the Dominica Botanic Gardens to the Public Works Department, from cooperative credit unions to village yards and seaside fisheries, our heritage rests not merely in buildings or bylaws, but in habits of cooperation, restraint, shared labor, and mutual respect.
Long before emancipation, enslaved Africans on Dominica forged systems of survival and resistance that transcended bondage. In the mountainous vastness of the island—among Maroon communities who refused captivity—Koudmen emerged as an organic social technology: collective labor, shared food, shared risk, shared reward.
It was not charity; it was dignity in action. It allowed people to plant, harvest, build, and survive in a hostile colonial economy that offered them no mercy. After emancipation, Koudmen did not disappear—it evolved. It moved from forest clearings to free villages, from resistance to sustenance, from survival to community building.
In places like St. Joseph, Koudmen lived in the everyday rhythms of the yard. Our mother Alberta Christian, nee John Baptiste (1929-2025), recalled for us the collaborative rhythm of the yard in which she grew up in the 1930s/1940s. That yard, the space between Ma Pwecess and Mr. Marsden near the frothing edge of the Caribbean Sea lapping at the stone-strewn shore, was not merely land; it was a commons. When the first fire was lit at dawn in the 1930s, it belonged to everyone. Neighbors shared embers without ceremony or calculation. When a pig was slaughtered, the meat was smoked together and distributed in trust. When fishermen set a seine, the call went out—not for wages, but for hands. Those who helped haul the net received fish; others bought with laughter, banter, and familiarity. This was an economy of belonging, not extraction.
These close-knit seaside villages produced people who knew one another, depended on one another, and were accountable to one another. It was a culture that discouraged excess and outlawed isolation. You could not easily fall into despair, delinquency, or degradation when your neighbors knew your parents, shared your food, and expected your contribution.
This ethic of cooperation extended naturally into formal civic institutions. Nowhere was this more evident than in the cooperative movement, particularly the Roseau Credit Union, whose Annual General Meetings filled St. Gerard’s Hall with hundreds of citizens. Led in part by the pioneering Roman Catholic nun Sister Alicia de Tremerie, alongside local leaders such as Mr. Elwin, Geoff Robinson, and others, these meetings were exercises in grassroots democracy and financial literacy. Profit-and-loss statements and balance sheets were not abstractions; they were community business.
Children attended with their parents—Wendell and Alberta Christian, and so many others—listening, learning, sometimes giggling, but absorbing the seriousness of collective responsibility. We waited patiently for the meetings to end, buoyed by the anticipation of refreshments announced by loudspeaker from the back of a Volkswagen moving through Roseau: the business of the Credit Union would be discussed—and yes, refreshments would be served.
Those refreshments were themselves a lesson in local pride and agricultural abundance. Alongside Tip-Top cheese mashed with mayonnaise and mustard on Eric’s Bakery bread, and potted meat mixed with pepper, there were the drinks—memorable, refined, and born entirely of Dominica’s soil. We drank L. Rose Lime Juice Cordial, a superb local drink now extinct on the island, its sharp elegance a marker of craftsmanship and restraint. There were buckets of lime squash, delicately balanced with brown sugar refined in taste, touched with a dash of vanilla essence and a careful hint of Angostura Bitters—a sophistication that spoke to inherited knowledge rather than excess. And there were buckets of freshly prepared grapefruit drink, tart and invigorating, ladled generously into cups many of us brought from home. Credit Union officers—often gracious ladies—served us with warmth and familiarity, and we children gladly returned for seconds. It was the productivity of our blessed Dominica quite literally feeding our stomachs, reinforcing the quiet lesson that a people who can nourish themselves can also govern themselves.
We drank Ju-C, Coca-Cola, and 7-Up, all bottled on island—because Dominica once had factories, pride in production, and confidence in its own hands. We toured those factories as schoolchildren from Roseau Mixed Infant School, Dominica Grammar School, and St. Mary’s Academy. We learned that work mattered, that production conferred dignity, and that self-reliance was not a slogan but a practice.
Our intellectual formation followed the same cooperative ethic. Student councils, clubs, and newspapers—the Dominica Grammar School Clarion and the St. Mary’s Academy Marian Messenger—trained us in collective thought. We typed, edited, cut stencils, debated ideas, and learned respect through shared intellectual labor. These were institutions of discipline, not indulgence, and they shaped habits of mind essential to citizenship.
And presiding over all of this—quietly, majestically—were the Dominica Botanic Gardens. On Sundays, dressed in our best, we walked its manicured lawns, admiring plants gathered from across the world through the global botanical network anchored by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew collaborating with its progeny – the Dominica.Botanic Gardens. The Gardens were not merely ornamental; they were practical. They enabled agricultural knowledge, food security, and export surplus—citrus, bananas, ground provisions—traded to Martinique, Guadeloupe, the British Virgin Islands, and Barbados through the formidable networks of our market women, many of whom were also traders, or hucksters.
The Botanic Gardens and the Dominica Forestry Service also inculcated in our generation a love of nature. That love of nature was born of a specific education nurtured in school gardens, the local agricultural society, Sunday strolls amidst nature’s splendor at the well-tended Dominica Botanic Gardens, and a government dedicated to conservation. So the “Nature Island” brand was a very intentional culture, not some tourism slogan lacking in meaning.
So today, Nasio Fontaine, Athie Martin, Jerry Brisbane, Dr. Irving Pascal, Dr. Dale Dangleben, Dr. Thomson Fontaine, and many others speak out against the destruction of our natural environment at Deux Branches and across the island. They speak out because they were nourished on aneducation of Koudmen, which is essentially a conservationist ethic. Conserve the land because it feeds us. Conserve the water because it slakes our thirst.
Keep the air clean because it is the breath of life. Koudmen and conservation therefore go hand in hand, and the Nature Island we speak of cannot survive where we destroy that cultural institution of love for our island. It is obvious that those who have cheapened our nationality and miseducated our people away from Koudmen and conservation do not even understand what it takes to be a Nature Islander. A Nature Islander loves our rivers, our forests. A Nature Islander respects the people and exalts the gifts of God’s bounty showered on us that the misled and misguided destroy in their ignorant dash to make of Dominica another Dubai.
Dominica escaped the worst ecological devastation of the slave-era sugar economy that scarred so many Caribbean islands. Our forests, rivers, and mountains endured—protected by geography, yes, but also by disciplined governance, an effective Forestry Service, and respect for environmental law. These institutions allowed us to thrive where others were stripped bare.
Most of the parents who built and sustained this culture are gone now. We lost our beloved mother, Alberta Christian, on February 4, 2025, and our father in 2011. Their generation is passing into history. We are the blessed remnant—those who saw, heard, tasted, and learned. And with that blessing comes responsibility.
For today, our inheritance is under siege. Citizenship has been battered. Profits are extracted. A new form of slavery threatens us—one without chains, but with passports for sale, law bent for convenience, and a nouveau riche elite promoted as local leadership while answering to foreign money launderers who neither know nor care for the thinking people of Dominica. Agriculture is neglected. Industry is hollowed out. Hotels stand half empty, born not of organic development but of passport-peddling schemes, often owned by the mysterious or by cronies of those in power.
This essay is written in the shadow of hard facts. On July 19, 2023, the United Kingdom removed visa-free access for Dominica. On December 16, 2025, the White House proclaimed travel sanctions against Dominica. Norway has imposed strict vetting on holders of Dominican passports. Canada sanctioned Dominica once before, in 1999–2000, during the UWP era, for this same wrong-headed passport trade—yet the present regime has pursued it with craven vigor.
On December 17, 2025, the day after the U.S. travel ban, our office phones rang repeatedly. For decades, we had sent tourists to Dominica, promoted our people, defended our culture, and upheld our good name. Now we watched traditional allies—the United States, Canada, and Europe—condemn the shameful state into which poor governance has led us: the erosion of law and order, the abandonment of “honesty is the best policy,” and the bitter truth of “birds of a feather flock together,” lessons we learned early from the Student Companion.
We have grown dangerously comfortable with crime and murder. We have sold out the hallowed values of community, faith, pride in our people, good conduct, thrift, peaceful living, self-help, and respect for law—the values that once marked Dominicans or Nature Islanders across the Caribbean as honorable and trustworthy.
It is now up to us—the remnant—to stand firm. To write. To teach. To organize. To defend the dignity of noble service and law-abiding behavior in the public interest. To hold fast to the best of our culture or perish with the indignity of a people who forgot who they were.
Let us never betray the Dominica that raised us.
Let us defend her against the tyranny of ruin.
My observation is that some of the most fervent lovers and supporters of Dominica were not born in Dominica. Sadly, most Dominicans do not truly respect the Nature Island that nature/providence has gifted to us. If they did, they would not allow garbage to pile up. Instead, they would do the requisite Koudment to keep our island clean and not wait on the government to do for us what we should do for ourselves. Joseph Jones the legendary curator of the Dominica Botanic Gardens (1892-1924), DGS principal Victor A. A. Archer, Dr. Robert Maguire, the Peace Corps Volunteer, Sister Alicia de Tremmerie, who pioneered the cooperative credit union movement and anti-malnutrition campaign, the social reform legislator and writer Elma Napier – none of those persons were born on Dominica but made our island a better place. Thanks, Roger, for standing for the betterment of the Nature Isle. People of conscience and intelligence appreciate you and all those who care for our people and environment.
Thanks, Roger. My observation is that non-Dominican-born people have been among the greatest defenders of our people and our environment. All the curators of the early Dominica Botanic Gardens (DBG) come to mind. Joseph Jones (UK-born) gave the rest of his life to the development of the DBG (1892-1924). A statue should be raised to him, and others noteworthy should be noted on a monument within the DBG. Elma Napier comes to mind. Peace Corps Volunteer Dr. Robert Maguire. Sister Alicia de Tremmerie, who pioneered the cooperative credit union movement, the anti-malnutritioncampaign to feed the chronically malnourished, the social league, and on and on. Only the ignorant nativist engages in the warped view that one has to be born on Dominica to love Dominica. I remember at law school, a misguided student made the illogical statement that only black people should criticize black people. If we were to follow such ill-informed reasoning, progress would never be made. Thank you!
As a self-adopted Dominica, I wholeheartedly agree.
To those of the present generation who challenge me with the words, “I Born Here”, my response is YES! But I was here long before you were born and I care for Dominica more than you.