[Woman VO] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia, the University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise, empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.

♪♪ [Josh VO] Of all the islands in the Caribbean, there are few that feel like they belong to another time.

Nevis is one of them.

Before the cruise ports, before the chains and the franchises, before paradise became a product, this is what the Caribbean looked like.

Unspoiled beauty that arrests the senses.

Of all the islands one can lay eyes on in the Caribbean, this is objectively among the most beautiful.

From the air, it's almost unreal.

Nevis Peak rising straight out of the sea, wrapped in blankets of green.

Villages that haven't been engineered for visitors, roads that still lead somewhere, not just to something.

-I live on an island, obviously.

There's always something going on on this island.

There's the beach, there's hikes, there's golf, there's spa, there's fishing.

There's a lot that can be done here.

What do I do?

I tend to watch Netflix and PBS.

-If you know the musical, the musical say that Hamilton is from a forgotten spot in the Caribbean.

Well, this is the forgotten spot in the Caribbean.

Alexander Hamilton was born on the beach in Nevis.

[chuckles] The beach is right there.

[Josh VO] Beauty like this always comes with weight, because long before Nevis was admired, it was exploited.

-That's the reality of our history here.

You'll find that our history on Nevis is both beautiful and tough, because there's a lot of negative things that would have happened in our history.

-[Josh VO] This island was built on sugar, on the backs of the enslaved, on human lives treated as currency.

The wealth flowed outward, the suffering stayed here.

The fields are quieter now.

The sugar mills are ruins, but nothing has been erased.

-[Dr.

Meredith] In 1800s... one fifth of the crowns, British crowns income came from this island.

Sugar trading, sugar production, slave-- -Right here.

-Right here.

One fifth.

That was a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge.

So that's, I mean, they really needed these, the colonies and they needed, this was the queen, it was the Queen of the Caribs.

Nevis, the Queen of the Caribs, that's why.

-[Josh VO] Nevis doesn't try to polish its history or sell you a fantasy, it remembers.

The past lives in the land, in the churches, and in the way the island governs itself.

And in the people who never left, and the ones who did, carrying Nevis with them across the world.

To understand this place, you don't start with what it offers you, you start with what it's endured.

This is Nevis and this is where the story begins.

They say the place you're from shapes you.

Maybe it defines you.

I've always thought you can't really understand yourself until you understand where you come from.

I'm Josh with PBS Appalachia.

In this series, I'm going from town to town, exploring the places people still call home-- their hometowns.

From Appalachia to the rest of the country, I've found we share more than we think, but it's the details, the food, the voices, the pride and traditions that make us different.

This isn't a story told from New York or LA.

It comes with roots embedded in Southwest Virginia, an often overlooked, misunderstood corner of the map.

That perspective matters because the character of America doesn't just live in its big cities.

It's the small towns, the back roads, the kitchens and the bars where people gather.

That's the lens I bring to this journey because the character of America isn't written in headlines.

It's lived in neighborhoods, on porches, at kitchen tables.

In this season, we're pushing past borders into communities far from here, into new towns, new kitchens, new homes.

Searching for what home means here and everywhere.

[Josh VO] For an island this small, Nevis carries a long memory.

Centuries of being governed from somewhere else by people who never worked the land or lived the consequences.

Independence didn't come with fireworks.

It came quietly in the 1980s with responsibility, with choices.

Today, Nevis governs itself on its own terms, carefully and deliberately.

Trying to honor the past without being trapped by it.

At the center of that balancing act is Premier Mark Brantley.

How are you?

So Mark as Premier, tell me a little bit about that.

What is kind of the... overall style of governance here?

-So the Premier, I think the best equivalent in the United States would be a governor.

So Nevis operates as if it's a state and it has the equivalent of a state legislature, which is headed by a Premier.

So we have our own legislature, we have our own internal responsibilities for taxation, the economy, healthcare, education, et cetera.

The federal government which is based on St.

Kitts.

Again it's similar to the United States, where we have a Prime Minister, not a President, but a Prime Minister, very reminiscent of the English system, parliamentary system, and that Prime Minister would have responsibility for Nevis for defense, internal security, and foreign representation, so diplomatic affairs.

So broadly speaking the Premier and the government of Nevis controls the internal mechanisms of the island.

So roads, electricity, the water, that's all our responsibility.

-We are in fact a federation, we're a country with two states.

So in essence, just like in America, you have a federal government, we also have a federal government here.

But the government of Nevis would be equivalent to what you'll have as a state government in America.

So it has to operate within certain limits.

But it is important for us to have our own government on Nevis.

We got independence September 19, 1983.

So we're 42 years old as a nation.

Right behind America.

[chuckles] -[Josh] [chuckles] -We're 250 years old, so.

[chuckles] -You said at one point somewhere that many of us who are older are holding onto a Nevis that was without any consideration for what a Nevis could be.

-It's a paradox of every small community.

I think small town USA is no different.

In the sense that there are some who are progressive and want to see the country evolve with the times and develop in a way that provides opportunities for the people from that community.

And there are others who don't want that.

They want the community to remain exactly as it is.

And what that leads to is an outflow of persons from that community.

So what we've been having in the Caribbean as a whole, but more specifically in St.

Kitts and Nevis, is that the majority of our best and our brightest leave.

They go to the United States.

They go to Canada.

They go to United Kingdom.

They go off initially to study, to pursue whatever career opportunities.

And then they stay.

And we suffer from what we refer to in the region as a brain drain.

I am very keen to see how we can transform that brain drain into a brain gain.

-[chuckles] -I want to know what opportunities we can create locally for our people here, but also for the thousands and thousands of citizens that we have living elsewhere, who have said to us time and time again, "We would love to be at home."

Who wouldn't want to be Nevis?

It's beautiful here.

"But you don't have the opportunities "that will allow us to use our education for our own advancement."

-Now, when one thinks, "Okay, after that, "what do this island has to offer?

Well, it has agriculture, definitely.

But it's only now recently that... the younger ones, who have the brain drain, they've been sent, but some have come back with very good training also in agriculture and thinking, "Okay, we can go into it.

Why didn't they want to do agriculture?"

Because it still has the stigma of working the land and being enslaved [inaudible] to the land.

And it's taking generations for that to work out.

♪♪ ♪♪ -[Mclevon] You know, it's the culture.

You go out, you go to school, some people stay, some people come back.

-Some return.

-Yeah.

I chose to return.

I went off to Canada, settled in Toronto, went to school there did electronics engineering.

-Nice.

-Worked as a biomedical engineer for about 10 years.

And then I decided, "Hey, it's time for me to go back home and contribute to my island."

- So would you say like tourism, is that the only future for Nevis or is there still a future in agriculture?

-[Mclevon] There's still a future in agriculture.

I mean, when you look at what we produce and what we import, we can self-sustain.

-[Josh] Right.

-[Mclevon] You see what I'm saying?

So there's a huge gap in the market still.

-[Josh] Yeah.

-[Mclevon] You know.

-[Dr.

Meredith] It's starting.

You can see some shade houses, people growing vegetables and nearly everyone has a little patch of land here and they grow their own crops.

You plant any grain, Pewww!

-It grows up like this.

-It grows well.

-Gina was looking for land for the vanilla farm.

Gina owns everything on where the farm is.

That is privately owned.

Where this is, it was just a little wall of ruins breaking down.

Gina thought, "Wouldn't it be nice "to make this into a little shop and cafe "so that when we have all the beans, we can sell them."

-[Josh] Sure.

-"And if you're selling them, why not have a coffee and a little vanilla thing on the side?"

♪♪ ♪♪ -[Gina] I'm a Brit-Swiss.

You can probably hear in my accent.

-Mm-hmm.

-And I was born in Africa, in East Africa.

And then I spent my childhood in Hong Kong actually.

My dad was a cartographer.

He was making maps.

My heart was much more with plants and botany and so on.

And so this is really a dream come true.

Everything I'm doing here, I'm learning on the job and I'm learning as fast as I can because I don't have 20 years to make mistakes.

-Right.

-There's a fabulous painter on island.

He's almost the national painter.

His name is getting a bit hidden here.

His name is Vaughn Anslyn.

And what he's doing here is telling the life of vanilla.

And so vanilla is an orchid and it's a climbing orchid.

And unlike a lot of orchids, it's got its feet in the ground, its roots are in the ground.

♪♪ ♪♪ These are the vanilla colors, yellow and green.

And this, you'll see it in a moment, is the... graphical example of vanilla growing up a tree.

-You had that on the house.

-Exactly.

-I saw that.

This is, I take like a female-owned operated business.

Is that a common theme across the island?

-[Gina] Oh, listen, I don't know.

There's a lot of backyard gardeners.

Almost everyone has veggies growing and this and that.

And I'm even thinking we can do a cooperative model for the vanilla whereby I give, I don't know, 50 to 100 plants to people and they grow it in their backyard and it's a cash crop.

-Yeah.

Okay.

-So that would be nice.

But I think agriculture is part of the blood of Nevis.

Nevis was the bread basket for St.

Kitts.

-[Josh VO] Not everything grown on Nevis comes out of the ground.

Some of it comes from paying attention, from noticing how light moves across the hills, how color changes after rain, how the island slows you down.

Deborah Tyrell turns that awareness into work.

Her textile art doesn't try to capture Nevis.

It responds to it.

The land, the sea, the rhythms in between.

Guided by an inner voice as much as intention, this is what it looks like when a place speaks back.

-[Josh] Textile art, is that something that is very Nevisian or is that something kind of uncommon to the area?

-It's something that's Deborah.

[laughs] -Something that's Deborah.

Okay.

[laughs] ♪♪ -[Deborah] I went to work for Four Seasons Hotels.

I was talking to a guest and I heard my own voice and then I was like, "Who's that talking?"

-[laughs] -[laughs] It was one of those moments where you know, you check yourself.

I moved back to Toronto for a while and then while up there again I heard, "Who's that talking?

Why are you here?

Find your place."

And I came back to Nevis.

-Wow, so this is your place.

-This is my place.

[laughs] This is my hometown, yes.

[laughs] How I am doing this now is more or less to tell my story.

-[Josh] Yeah, okay.

-[Deborah] I started cutting fabrics and strips and laying them on top of each other and stitching and stitching and I didn't know what I was doing but I was stitching and I guess I was on a discovery.

Hearing voices... I think we all do.

I think everybody hears something.

Some of us don't know how to react when we hear it.

I don't always know how to react when I hear it but there are times when it just feels right.

-Like you just know.

-Yeah.

♪♪ ♪♪ -[Dr.

Meredith] In 1800s, one fifth of the crown's... British crowns income came from this island, sugar trading, sugar production, slave.

-Right here.

-Right here.

One fifth.

-One fifth.

-That was a huge, huge, huge, huge.

So that's, I mean they really needed these, the colonies and they needed, this was the queen, it was the Queen of the Caribs, huh?

Nevis, the Queen of the Caribs.

-[Josh VO] I found the Nevis House of Assembly meets inside a building that shares its ground with Alexander Hamilton's birthplace.

One structure preserves the island's story, another honors a man who left and shaped another nation.

And upstairs Nevis governs itself on its own terms, past and present in constant conversation.

-If you know the musical, the musical say that Hamilton is from a forgotten spot in the Caribbean.

Well, this is the forgotten spot in the Caribbean.

Alexander Hamilton was born on the beach in Nevis.

[chuckles] The beach is right there.

♪♪ You can't talk about Alexander Hamilton without really speaking about his immigrant status.

And you know... it's always interesting to me that Hamilton is considered an immigrant when in fact he was born in Nevis.

At that time being born in a place like Nevis, how is that different than if you were born in any of the colonies in mainland USA?

Any of the 13 colonies.

You were subject to the same king.

-[Josh] You were still under the crown.

-[Greg] Exactly.

-[Josh] Yeah.

-[Greg] Hamilton in fact had a law practice that he gave up when he decided to take on the job of being the first Secretary of the Treasury.

He gave up what would have been a lucrative law practice.

-I was trained as a lawyer.

-[Josh] Okay.

-So I'm a lawyer by profession.

And then at some point about 20 years ago I took a vow of poverty and entered politics.

-Okay.

-So you know, I used to make money as a lawyer.

Now it's just public service.

I come from an incredibly humble circumstances.

And I was educated through scholarships and policies that frankly were designed to help those who are less fortunate to get an opportunity.

And I thought that I wanted to sort of pay that forward.

I wanted to be involved in a way that I could help people.

♪♪ -Slavery [inaudible] as early as 1774 relaxes the sinews of industry, clips the wings of commerce and introduces misery and indigence in every shape.

This is Alexander Hamilton making a case against slavery.

And the reason I say he's doing it in quite a quintessential Alexander Hamilton way is because he's using economics and business to make a case against slavery.

My favorite quote from Hamilton, "Who taught most about liberty and equality?

"Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and the whip for affrighted slaves in the other?"

Hamilton is asking a great question, "How can you be involved in slavery while at the same time believing in the bill of rights?"

♪♪ -[Josh VO] What I've noticed here is that history not only lives in the ruins, but in the questions Nevis still asks itself.

The island gave the world one of its most famous names, Alexander Hamilton.

His story told in books on stages far from the soil, but it also gave shape to something far more complicated.

Places where faith, defiance and imagination came together to test an impossible idea, freedom.

In places like Cottle Church, the dichotomy of ruin and possibility sits side by side.

-This was built in 1824.

-1824.

-Yeah.

And the significant, well, something that I find interesting is that in reality in 1824, that is still the middle of slavery.

And in fact, this guy Thomas Cottle, one of my favorite [inaudible] stories that effectively he desegregated the church and his plantation.

Yeah, what I find on Nevis is that by and large, we have a population that really looks at life where it's live and let live.

The issues related to racism, et cetera, that you may find on Nevis, usually pops up when somebody brings it here.

-Okay.

-You'll come here, yes, you're a different race from a different culture.

Before you know it, you're intertwined.

Before you know it, you're going to places.

And yes, everybody is there.

You don't find segregation on this island.

Where you'll find that people may, "Oh, well, why do certain people live in certain places?"

Well, it's like everywhere you go in this world.

I guarantee you, every city in America has a Chinatown, don't they?

-Well, sure, yeah.

-They have a Little Italy.

Why?

Because you're drawn to people who you can relate to, who might speak the same language, who may have the same sort of culture, but because you're drawn to them doesn't mean that there's an exclusion of anybody else.

-Is Nevis a relatively religious community or?

-Of course, we're a religious community.

And when I say that we're a religious community, I think that the personality of the island is that.

You asked about earlier about... the relationships between races and between people of different cultures.

I think that it's informed by our religious background.

♪♪ ♪♪ -So this plaque shows everybody who Thomas Cottle had enslaved here at the time when he built this place in 1824.

For me coming here, just seeing these people makes it... brings it home and makes it a little more personal.

It's not just some place.

So I look at this list and I feel something, but I also have to remind myself and know for sure that there is in fact... a time in history when slavery was the norm.

As sad as it is, but we should not, especially now that this is our moment to take care of history, we should not allow modern-day... morals and what is normal... to sort of corrupt history as we look at it.

We must take history in the context of what it is.

The moment we start to apply our moral standards today to history is when we begin to cheat ourselves out of the effect that our history should actually have on us.

It says here, "Thomas John Cottle, Esq."

He's a lawyer, but for many years president of this island.

This was not just some other guy.

He wasn't just some other slave owner.

He wasn't just some other plantation owner.

This was an important man.

And the source of my conflict when I come here, because the reality is, how can I say that I come here to celebrate him, which I do, but at the same time, have to remember people like Violet on that list.

I'll be honest and say it is the part on this plaque that I avoid the most because of the conflict it creates for me and how offensive it sounds.

-Yeah.

-It's this part.

"To his Negroes, a mild and humane master."

That phrase, "To his Negroes," just basically tells you that it is unapologetic that he owned people.

I cannot let what happened in the past and my feelings towards it influence the way I'm supposed to feel about the history and influence my responsibility to act appropriately towards that history in this moment.

Who else was gonna end slavery?

It absolutely had to be people like Thomas Cottle.

-It had to start somewhere.

-Yes, and this was the only place it can really start and ultimately finish.

It was the people who had the slaves.

It was the people who enslaved others.

Those were the ones who were in the best position to do something about it.

And as complicated as it is, I would like to think that someone like Thomas Cottle did something about this, not because it was easy but because it was right.

-[Josh VO] It's easy, almost comforting, to judge the past by the standards of the present.

Harder to sit with it, to understand it on its own terms.

What Greg offers isn't nostalgia or absolution, it's context.

An acknowledgement that history here is complicated, unfinished.

And maybe that's why what's happening now matters.

Nevisian's reclaiming agency, not through slogans or monuments, but through work, through land, through small deliberate acts of independence.

From agriculture to cottage industries, the future here is being grown by hand.

♪♪ -[Josh] Fill in the blank for me.

I ask everyone to do this.

Say, "Nevis is..." and then tell me what it is to you.

In as many or as few words as you like.

What is it to you?

-Nevis is how the Caribbean used to be.

You go to much of the Caribbean now and you know, it's KFC and the Subway and stop lights.

It's lost its luster.

Nevis is very, very clear about who we are, what we are.

-The people are so welcoming.

You know, you can live in paradise and if you're surrounded by nasty people, it's not paradise.

[laughs] So the weather is wonderful and the whole of the geography of the island is fabulous 'cause you've got this wonderful mountain up there, but people, people are fabulous.

There's a joyousness, which when you come from cold old countries and everything's gray, everyone is miserable, but you don't find miserable people here, you know.

-It's kind of hard to be miserable in paradise.

-[laughs] -It's the people.

Because of who we are, it's not fake.

It is just who we are.

We cannot discount the fact that we are shaped by how we have to live and have had to live on this small island.

-[Josh VO] The story of Nevis doesn't end here.

This was just the beginning.

Join me in part two and we'll explore Nevis today.

You'll get a deeper glimpse into the lives and communities that continue shaping the island now and re-imagining its future.

♪♪ -[Woman VO] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia, the University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise, empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.