Community-based coral restoration and livelihood diversification in St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, titled “Building climate resilience for food and water security in two SIDS through EbA (B- Resilience4SIDS),” funded by the Inter-American Foundation (IAF). Image courtesy We Are Mayreau, Inc., used with permission. By Holly Bynoe This is the first instalment of a two-part post (Part 2 is here) under the Shared Island Stories initiative, supported by the School of Art History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, which explores ways in which to build collaborative tools to inform case studies in support of the project “Sacred Space and Social Memory: Interrogating Co-becoming in Community-Based Practices in the Grenadines and the Isle of Skye.” Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) with project reference: EP/X023036/1. The author, Holly Bynoe, bottom left, receiving a warm welcome in Mayreau. Photo courtesy Aly Ollivierre, used with permission. The two-hour trip to Mayreau from Bequia across the transboundary Grenadines — a group of nearly 100 islands that form part of Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines — is a 45-kilometre trip south by fast ferry. It began with the glassy grey waters and overcast skies of August. Much-needed rain welcomed us upon arrival; the system grew into Hurricane Franklin, dumping over 12 inches of rain on the Dominican Republic days later. The sudden cooling felt like we were nestled in a cosy, verdant space surrounded by families and new friends, setting the tenor of the days to come. You know something is different about a place when the community welcomes you with hugs, hand squeezes, smiles like they have known you for a long time, music, food, and drink for all. We were amid a family reunion, an “ole talk” session — a Mayreau “lime.” My interest in entangled colonial and imperial histories, livingness, heritage stories, spiritual practices and social activism has fuelled questions about how Vincentian tangible and intangible heritages are affected by the communities’ relationship to land, ongoing foreign investment and settlement, one another, and the more-than-human world. The Isle of Skye parallels some of these Caribbean realities, including a housing crisis brought on by the sale of properties to wealthy British investors, the emigration of youth due to the housing and employment crisis, the imperialist diminution of Indigenous cultures, and the ways in which tourism and land expropriation have shifted the ways that people engage with land, rituals, customs, and heritage. Community-based practices are looking at alternative routes to belonging, justice and reparation and, while the spaces are very different, commonalities exist in the challenge of trying to belong. I therefore happily jumped body and heart first into several impromptu, no-holds-barred conversations with We Are Mayreau’s (WAM) director, Marion Isaacs, a resolute, empathetic and community-spirited leader, activist and tradition holder who spoke of the financial, governance and environmental landscape of the southern Grenadines and the challenges it faces, along with the positive transformation in which the organisation continues to participate. The all-women's non-profit was formed in 2016, with the goal of improving access to education and training for community members. WAM aims to improve access and participation, health and well-being for members of its small island community, and is focused on holistic empowerment, which encompasses issues of people, culture and the natural environment. Mayreau, with its population of approximately 350 people, is part of the Tobago Cays Marine Park (TCMP). Four of its cays — Petit Rameau, Petit Bateau, Jamesby and Baradal — lie within the semicircular, aptly named Horseshoe Reef. A fifth, Petit Tabac, lies just outside the well-developed Holocene bank-barrier reef, one of the longest — approximately 4 km — in the southern Grenadines. Mayreau is located west on the circle's periphery and the island has used this area for its ongoing Coral Restoration Project. The Tobago Cays were designated a conservation area in 1987 under Fisheries Regulations, and the TCMP was created in late 1997. Coral reefs are essential to marine biodiversity conservation, housing seagrass beds and important feeding groups, and offering breeding grounds for threatened turtles and other marine life. Mayreau itself has vulnerable but extant endangered mangroves. The island's land tenure laws were plantation/estate-bound until the 1990s when the Vincentian government advocated for acreage to be released for sale from the Eustace family, who had held sole possession from 1942, with prior ownership from 1822 — pre-emancipation — in the hands of the Saint Hilaire family.