SEATTLE (AP) — Patrick DePoe was in high school the last time his Native American tribe in Washington state was allowed to hunt whales. He was on a canoe that greeted the crew towing in the body of a gray whale. His shop class worked to clean the bones and reassemble the skeleton, which hangs in a tribal museum.

Two decades later, he and the Makah Tribe — the only American Indians with a treaty right to hunt whales — are still waiting for government permission to hunt again as their people historically did. The tribe, in the remote northwest corner of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, hopes to u...