Fero, Brianna Marie2025-10-072025-10-072025https://hdl.handle.net/1773/54137This capstone explores how the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe enacts cultural revitalization as a form of sovereign governance. Through a community-centered case study grounded in Indigenous methodologies, the project examines how land, language, and intergenerational knowledge function as cultural policy systems: practiced, protected, and passed on across generations. The research centers the experiences and perspectives of four Port Gamble S’Klallam tribal members and knowledge holders who generously shared their reflections on identity, governance, revitalization, and cultural continuity. The central research question guiding this project asks: How have the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe’s efforts to reclaim and preserve their culture, land, and language impacted their community, particularly in relation to women and youth? Rather than viewing cultural revitalization as a symbolic act or institutional initiative, this study treats it as a lived, ongoing form of governance expressed through practices such as beadwork, naming, early childhood education, language reclamation, and intergenerational teaching. These practices form the foundation of a policy system that is community-defined, relationally governed, and resistant to settler frameworks which have historically devalued Indigenous knowledge. The methodology involved long-form, semi-structured interviews, thematic coding, and fieldnotes guided by a framework of relational accountability. Reflexivity and care were central to every stage of the research design. Interviewees reviewed their transcripts and retained full agency over how their words were represented. Conversations were treated as knowledge sharing rooted in trust, sovereignty, and respect. Each storyteller contributed unique insights based on their generational position, leadership roles, and experiences of cultural transmission. What emerged from conversations was a powerful portrait of cultural resurgence that is led largely by women and sustained through daily acts of care, leadership, and teaching. Youth were consistently described as central to the future of this work, already singing in language, harvesting cedar, participating in Canoe Journeys, and influencing their families. The findings demonstrate how revitalization is a dynamic, forward-looking movement rooted in land, relational governance, and intergenerational love. Various acts of resurgence persist despite structural barriers such as housing scarcity, land restrictions, and chronic underfunding of Native language programs. This project contributes to the field of policy studies by challenging dominant assumptions about where policy occurs and who creates it. It argues for a broader and more accurate understanding of governance, one which recognizes community-driven cultural systems as strategic, enduring forms of policy in their own right. A community-facing deliverable accompanies this report, illuminating the ethical foundation of the project and its commitment to relational research. What follows is not a study of policy from the outside, but a record of policy as it lives within a sovereign Nation: enacted through culture, led with care, and sustained by a community who never stopped protecting what matters most.en