Former Riverbend High School Educator and National History Teacher of the Year Debuts Children's Book
"Grandmother Moon" by Wunneanatsu Lamb-Cason is a love letter to her grandmother, an Indigenous historian and storyteller.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Every Friday afternoon while she was growing up, Wunneanatsu Lamb-Cason’s grandmother would pick her up from Meriden, Connecticut, where she lived with her mother, and drive her two hours away to spend the weekend on the reservation.
“My grandmother was an educator—she was a journalist, published author, and college professor, and also [Schaghticoke/HoChunk] tribal historian and a master storyteller,” Lamb-Cason said. “So every car ride was a learning opportunity… I always felt so safe and heard, and there was no question that I asked that she did not answer.”
One night, when Lamb-Cason was about 7 or 8 years old, she noted how big the moon looked in the sky and asked her grandmother, “Doesn’t it look like the moon is following us?”
“Of course she’s following us, N’Tah [‘my heart’ in Algonquian],” her grandmother answered. “She is Grandmother Moon!”
This led into a retelling of Indigenous stories about the Grandmother Moon, her role in connecting generations of families, and how to listen to and honor her.
Decades later, Lamb-Cason—a longtime history teacher at Spotsylvania’s Riverbend High School and the 2024 National History Teacher of the Year—has turned that memory and the stories she learned from her grandmother into her debut children’s book, Grandmother Moon.
The book will be released on August 26, and it’s the first of three that Lamb-Cason will write for publisher Beaming Books. All will focus on the relationship between the young girl and her grandmother.
“These children’s books will be my way to honor [my grandmother’s] legacy as a story teller and as an Indigenous grandmother,” Lamb-Cason said. “It’s also a love letter to her.”
Lamb-Cason wrote the first draft of Grandmother Moon in 2019, for her oldest daughter, who was working on a senior thesis for her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in illustration.
“She asked me to write a book that she could illustrate to highlight the need for diverse voices in children’s literature,” Lamb-Cason recalled.
At first, she saw the story as being just for her daughter, but after receiving positive feedback—and with her daughter’s support—she started looking into whether she could have it published for a wider audience.
She joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators to seek out professional advice and spent some time editing and fine-tuning the draft. Then, she participated in Pitch Wars, a biannual Twitter event (that was discontinued in 2022) in which unpublished authors used the platform’s 140 characters to pitch their manuscripts using the hashtag #PitMad.
“Aquisitions editors and agents scroll through looking for the hashtag,” Lamb-Cason said. “If they ‘like’ the tweet, that’s an invitation to send them your manuscript.”
She got four ‘likes’ on her pitch. She sent out the manuscript, and got a response from an acquisitions editor offering to buy it—and requesting two more.
“It was so surreal,” Lamb-Cason said.
Though Lamb-Cason’s daughter had illustrated the first draft of Grandmother Moon for her thesis, she didn’t feel that she was ready to be considered to illustrate the published version. Since she wasn’t able to work with her daughter, Lamb-Cason negotiated agency over book’s illustrations as part of her contract.
“I wanted to ensure there was not any misinterpretation or misrepresentation in the imaging,” Lamb-Cason said. “So they allowed me to give them a list of established illustrators that I would want to work with. I did research and looked at people who have done Indigenous children’s books before, and thankfully the person who was first on my list [Trisha B. Waters] was available, and she did a stunning job.”
Lamb-Cason said it was important to her that the book and its visuals both honor the long history of Indigenous storytelling and show that it doesn’t only exist in the past.
“You see this girl who’s riding in a car and living in a city—who is very much alive in the contemporary world,” she said. “It’s really important for children to see that Indigenous people are still here and have dynamic lives and relationships and communities.”
Lamb-Cason’s grandmother died one month before she received the offer letter, and she feels her grandmother’s presence in everything that’s happened around the book.
“All of this feels like her hand is in it,” Lamb-Cason said. “She was such a huge proponent of reading and making sure that I had a love for books, but also for history.”
Lamb-Cason—who last year moved back to Connecticut to be closer to her family and to take a job as assistant director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University—will hold her first official event as a published author at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts on August 30.
She’ll also visit the elementary school she attended, where she wrote as a kindergartener that she wanted to be “a pediatrician and children’s book writer” when she grew up—and she’s working on arranging visits this fall or winter to Spotsylvania, where she still has many friends and former students.
“It [was] so incredibly hard to leave Riverbend,” Lamb-Cason told the Advance last year. “It is an amazing community.”
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