After 20 years, Washington tribe hopes to hunt whales again

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 use the whales for food and to make handicrafts, artwork and tools they can sell.

The tribe’s plans have been tied up in legal fights and layers of scientific review. The next step is a weeklong administrative hearing that began Thursday in Seattle. Whatever the result, it’s likely to be stuck in further court challenges, with animal rights activists vowing to block the practice they call unnecessary and barbaric.

“It shouldn’t have taken 20 years to be where we’re at now,” said DePoe, a tribal council member. “People ask how it makes me feel. I want to ask, ‘How does it make you feel that this is the process we’re having to go through to exercise a right that’s already been agreed upon?’ It’s a treaty right. It’s settled law.”

In 1855, the Makah, a tribe that now numbers about 1,500, turned over 470 square miles (1,217 square kilometers) of land to the U.S. under a treaty that promised them the “right of taking fish and of whaling or sealing at usual and accustomed grounds.” They killed whales until the 1920s, giving it up because commercial whaling had devastated gray whale populations.

By 1994, gray whales in the eastern Pacific Ocean had rebounded and they were removed from the...