“Don’t let others tell your story,” Wunneanatsu Lamb-Cason would tell her students.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
When Wunneanatsu Lamb-Cason was growing up in Connecticut, she hated history class.
“If you had told me then that I was going to be a history teacher, I would have laughed in your face,” Lamb-Cason said. “I hated going to that class. In all honesty it was because I didn’t feel seen—I didn’t feel like my history mattered.”
Decades later, Lamb-Cason—who taught world geography and cultures as well as African American history at Riverbend High School in Spotsylvania for 10 years—is not only a history teacher but was recently named the National History Teacher of the Year for 2024 by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Lamb-Cason is a member of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation of Connecticut and is affiliated with the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin. Mostly, she said, the history of indigenous peoples was overlooked by the history teachers she had growing up, and “when the story of my culture was touched on, it was inaccurate.”
She’s dedicated her teaching career to making sure no student feels that way again.
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Lamb-Cason spent the first part of her career working in museum education, but when her husband was stationed at Marine Corps Base Quantico and the family settled in Spotsylvania, she started working as a substitute teacher in the schools to be close to her children.
That’s when she discovered a passion for teaching.
“I wanted to be the history teacher that I didn’t have—to show students that their place in American history matters. Their perspective matters and it is valued,” Lamb-Cason said.
Deborah Frazier, now the school division’s chief academic officer, hired Lamb-Cason for her first teaching position in the county at Chancellor Middle School. She was there for four years and then moved into her dream job at Riverbend High School.
“Riverbend was my end goal,” Lamb-Cason said. “The history and social studies department there is so amazing that people very rarely leave. But finally, [former principal Troy Wright] was able to bring me on. He knew my passion was to teach African American history. I was the first indigenous teacher and teacher of color to take on that course. That was my passion.”
Lamb-Cason’s “hook” for getting her students interested in history is that “history is just gossip well documented.”
“It’s full of fighting and drama and all of these things that led us to where we are today,” she said. “You can forget about Reddit and Tik Tok. Just dive into a history book.”
“I’d always tell them, ‘The T is hot today,’” she continued.
Lamb-Cason’s approach to teaching is “all about centering my students and making sure they feel seen and valued.”
“If a student told me, ‘This isn’t my experience,’ my response would be, ‘Ok, well, talk to me about it, tell me about, teach me.’” she said. “I’m a lifelong learner. I fully believe that I learned as much, if not more, from my students that I’ve had over the last 10 years than I ever taught them.”
Lamb-Cason said she also tailored her classes to fit what her students wanted to learn.
“What I do is survey my students at the beginning of the school year,” she said. “I ask them to tell me what things they are interested in, and I will find a way to incorporate it into the curriculum.”
Some of the lessons Lamb-Cason facilitated based on student interest include the history of Black haircare and Black homeownership in America, and the business of the National Football League and the National Basketball Association.
Lamb-Cason said some of her most significant lessons stemmed from students asking to learn about difficult subjects. All of her classes begin with a warm-up slide that states all the holidays and events that are commemorated that day, and one year on September 30, in an 8th grade world history class, she included the fact that it was “Orange Shirt Day”—a day established in Canada to memorialize the devastating effects of the Indian residential school system.
“The students asked if I could talk more Indian boarding schools,” Lamb-Cason said. “They said, ‘Why have we never heard about this before?’ These were 8th graders. They were so curious.”
Lamb-Cason’s stepfather was a survivor of a residential school, so she was able to use his story as a jumping off point for discussing the history and lasting effects of these institutions and the steps Canada has taken towards truth and reconciliation.
Virginia’s world geography curriculum does not include lessons on the indigenous people of the U.S. and Canada, Lamb-Cason said—so she designed a lesson. Every year, she would reserve the auditorium for all the world geography sections and would teach the lesson to 300 kids over two days.
Lamb-Cason feels she was able to be a successful teacher—with some of the highest test pass rates in the county, she said—because she worked to develop rapport with her students, because she was trusted and supported by school administration, and because she communicated frequently with parents.
She always gave families notice ahead of time of an upcoming lesson that might be controversial and gave alternate assignments—and “not once” did any family choose the alternate assignment.
“Not once, for any movie or any activity, did I have a parent say, ‘I don’t want my kid to watch that or learn that,’” Lamb-Cason said.
Lamb-Cason and her family moved away from Virginia this year to be closer to family in Connecticut and she has taken a new job as assistant director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University.
“It’s so incredibly hard to leave Riverbend,” Cason said. “It is an amazing community.”
As the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s National History Teacher of the Year, Lamb-Cason will receive a $10,000 grand prize at a ceremony on October 15, at the Harvard Club of New York City. The award will be presented by Janai Nelson, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
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