At 23, Alexia St Bernard stands at the forefront of a new wave of heritage guardians—young Caribbean scholars determined to protect, reinterpret, and re-imagine the stories that shape us.
Raised in Siparia in a large, close-knit family, Alexia’s earliest lessons in history came not from textbooks, but from her father.
“We spent hours watching the History Channel, Discovery, and old westerns,” she recalled. “My interest in history was always there, but it wasn’t until Form Three when it truly clicked for me that this was my future.”
She laughs now at the memory of wanting to be both an archaeologist and a paleontologist as a child—ambitions she thought she’d abandoned, only to rediscover them later with renewed purpose.
That rediscovery flourished at St Joseph’s Convent, San Fernando, where her academic excellence placed her on the CXC Regional Merit List for History in 2021. It grew even further during her BA in History at UWI St Augustine, where she graduated with First Class Honours and minors in Sociology and Management Studies. It was there, during her very first heritage studies course taught by Dr Allison Ramsay, that something shifted.
“It became my passion,” she said. “Heritage preservation gave me a deeper understanding of who I am and the culture I come from.”
Alexia went on to pursue every heritage course available, winning the Angelo Bissessarsingh Prize for Heritage Studies and anchoring her undergraduate thesis in the essential but often overlooked field of heritage management.
That same curiosity for the stories embedded in landscapes, objects, and traditions has since propelled her into a growing list of research and professional roles spanning archives, museums, archaeology, and international climate policy.
Over the past two years she has served as a research associate for the UN Harmony with Nature Programme and the 1 OCEAN Foundation/UNDP Somalia, contributing to digitised archives, policy materials, and even co-authoring climate adaptation plans. As a research assistant to UWI lecturer Dr Keron Niles, she delved into the cultural losses facing Caribbean and Pacific island nations due to climate change—work that melds her two great interests: heritage and environmental resilience.
Still, one of her most cherished contributions is local: archiving a centuries-old private home library, a labour of love that, to her, embodied the core of heritage preservation.
“It’s about memory,” she said. “It’s about ensuring what mattered to those before us survives for future generations.”
Her commitment to Trinidad and Tobago’s story deepened even further through archaeology. As an Archaeological Technician with the REACH Field School—an international collaboration among Northwestern University, UWI, the National Trust, and the Palmiste Historical Society—Alexia participated in excavation, artefact classification, mapping, and public outreach.
This work recently helped uncover evidence of the historic Palmiste Estate community that lay hidden beneath the modern park: workers’ house sites, ceramic and glass fragments, blacksmithing tools, and the remnants of a 19th-century structure still holding a clay oil lamp in place. Together with drone mapping, archival research, and oral histories, the project has begun to piece together the estate’s buried past.
“It shed new light on the rich cultural history of the area,” Palmiste Historical Society president Terrence Honoré said.
For Alexia, the project offered something else: a deepened appreciation of how the past lives on in familiar spaces, often unnoticed.
Today, she serves on the Board of Directors of the Palmiste Historical Society as its appointed History Advocate, writing historical articles, supporting research, and—perhaps most meaningfully—leading youth engagement.
Recently, she co-led the Society’s launch of the Junior History Club, a new programme that welcomed students from five secondary schools. At the Mini Cocoa Estate in Palmiste Park, Alexia guided 24 students and their teachers through the history of cocoa cultivation before they planted more than ten cocoa trees.
“It was the perfect way to begin,” she said—hands in the soil, history alive beneath their feet, young people starting their own relationship with heritage.
The club, she explained, aims to nurture a generation of young historians through field trips, creative projects, site visits, guest talks, and environmental care activities.
“I want them to see that history isn’t just something in books. It’s in our landscapes, our recipes, our street names—our daily lives.”
For Alexia, history is not merely a field of study. It is her grounding force.
“This field enriches my soul,” she said. “Even though it’s niche and opportunities are limited, it gives me the peace and purpose that make everything worth it.”
She plans to pursue an MPhil in Heritage Studies, followed by an MSc in Climate Science. Her long-term goal: contributing to sustainable, inclusive, climate-adaptive frameworks for Caribbean heritage preservation through national and regional institutions.
Ultimately, what drives her is a simple truth: cultural heritage—especially in a country dominated by the oil and gas economy—must not be sidelined.
“I want to help streamline history into the mainstream,” she said. “We need to learn from our past rights and wrongs. We need to preserve the legacies that shape who we are as a region.”
And as she continues her work—from archives to archaeological sites, boardrooms to cocoa fields—one thing is certain: Alexia St Bernard is already shaping the future of how Trinidad and Tobago remembers its past.
