ABSTRACT
The Carib Reserve on the West Indian island of Dominica contains more than 2,000 inhabitants who maintain a tradition of tenaciously defending their reservation status. Dominican Caribs are neither racially nor culturally distinctive, for they and the general population of this Commonwealth nation are the products of 450 years of miscegenation and cultural assimilation. However, Caribs do constitute a distinctive territorial minority (as defined in this paper). The future of this ascriptive status is closely tied to the variable of structural pluralism. Presently, because of their reservation status, Caribs have preferential access to important resource domains; but current trends suggest that the reservation status and the concomitant minority status of the Caribs eventually will give way to structural assimilation.
