Working Group on Animals in the Law and Humanities (Peter Bo Zhang)

Working Group on Animals in the Law and Humanities  Presents:

Guest: Peter Bo Zhang

Title: The Living Corpus of Indigenous Harvest Rights

Abstract: Across Canada, Indigenous harvest rights are constitutionally recognized even as the animal populations that sustain them continue to erode. This paper advances the concept of a harvest right’s “living corpus”: the abundance, health, habitat relations, and lived presence of the animals through which harvesting remains a meaningful practice over time. It shows how environmental regulation manages cumulative ecological decline through baselines calibrated to minimum viable population (MVP), leaving the ecological substance of section 35 rights outside constitutional supervision. Treating harvest rights as living relationships, the paper argues that ecological integrity forms part of the protected interest once a species-linked right is proven. Indigenous guardianship is theorized as governance of the living corpus through first-responder responsibility and longitudinal record-making, rather than as supplementary evidence within state regimes. Finally, the paper suggests that Crown fiduciary duty supplies a restrained basis for reviewing discretionary decisions that foreseeably undermine the living corpus, without requiring courts to manage ecosystems or adjudicate Indigenous ontologies.

Bio: Peter Bo Zhang is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. His research explores human-animal relations through the lenses of law, history, anthropology, STS, and religion. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Animal History, China’s Environmental History: A Reader (Columbia University Press), and International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication (Springer Nature). He holds a BA from McGill University and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge