With the help of fishing boats, the men towed their catch into a small cove in Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, where hundreds of fellow Makah tribal members greeted them like heroes. People hugged and cried. They celebrated what felt like the return of better days.

It was 1999, and the tribe’s first successful whale hunt in seven decades. It was also their last.

The Makah are the only Native Americans who have a treaty with the United States government that explicitly allows them to hunt whales. But they have not because of a protracted administrative and legal battle waged by conservationists and animal rights activists, who call the practice “barbaric” and have generated a wave of negative sentiment against the tribe.

The two-decade tussle could flare in the coming weeks over a proposal that would allow the Makah to resume whaling as early as next year. Tribal members say the struggle goes beyond their right to hunt, and see it as a fight over restoring Native identity, honoring indigenous treaty rights and respecting age-old traditions.

“People argue that you haven’t done it for 70 years, you don’t need to do it anymore,” said Patrick DePoe, 37, a member of the Makah tribal council. “They’re not Makah. They don’t understand what it means for us.”

An administrative law judge was scheduled to hear arguments Thursday on a proposal by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to exempt the Makah from the federal ban on whaling. The exemption would allow the tribe to catch as many as four Eastern North Pacific gray whales every two years for the next decade.