After reading several of these answers, I used a combination of several in Aug of 2018 to retrieve the query string params through lambda for python 3.6.
First, I went to API Gateway -> My API -> resources (on the left) -> Integration Request. Down at the bottom, select Mapping Templates then for content type enter application/json
.
Next, select the Method Request Passthrough template that Amazon provides and select save and deploy your API.
Then in, lambda event['params']
is how you access all of your parameters. For query string: event['params']['querystring']