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Angela Fernandez and Bryce Edwards have received TRC Teaching Awards from the Students’ Law Society and the Indigenous Law Students’ Association (ILSA).

The awards recognize faculty who have made an outstanding contribution to the implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s call to action #28 by teaching course content involving Indigenous perspectives, topics, and law, as well as Canadian Aboriginal Law. Fernandez was named the full-time faculty recipient; Edwards the adjunct faculty recipient.

Professor Fernandez teaches contracts, legal process, legal history and animal law. Her first-year legal process course covers the way in which the TRC grew out of the 2015 Residential School class action case Cloud et al. v. Canada. and her upper-year animal law course includes a section on “Indigenous Perspectives”, which explores the ways in which Indigenous Rights (e.g. to hunt and fish) come into conflict with the settler colonialism embedded in animal rights discourse.

Edwards, a partner at Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP, provides legal and strategic advice to First Nations on lands and resource matters, intergovernmental negotiations, and treaty and rights claims. He teaches courses in Aboriginal Law and Policy and coaches students in the Kawaskimhon Moot, a consensus-based, non-adversarial moot that incorporates Indigenous legal traditions alongside federal, provincial and international law.

“Within their classes, they don't just touch on Indigenous issues; they put them in the foreground,” said the ILSA’s Lavalee Forbes. “Their courses recognize and confront the interplay between settler colonialism and the legal system in Canada.”