Lyda Conley devoted her entire life to protecting the land now known as the Wyandot National Burying Ground in Kansas City, Kansas, and the retelling of her story often starts when she and her sisters, Helena and Ida, built a 6-by-8-foot shack to take up residence over their parents’ graves.
But a new collection of primary source material shows that the sisters’ story begins well before their 1906 move into the cemetery — and that their so-called “Seven Years War” has not completely ended.
While Congress’ passage of an appropriations bill on June 16, 1906, allowed sale of the cemetery and relocation of the remains to Quindaro Cemetery, “Lyda Conley and the Fight to Preserve Huron Indian Cemetery,” edited by Tai Edwards, Samantha Gill, and Stephanie Bennett, makes clear the cemetery had come under attack about four other times before that.
Wyandots repeatedly fought off developers who saw the land as prime real estate in the heart of Kansas City, Kansas, which it still is, says Edwards.
“So that would have been during Lyda's childhood,” Edwards says. “She would have seen, with other Wyandot community members, that there was interest in the cemetery, which Wyandot members talk about as (a reason) why she goes to law school.”
Edwards, who directs the Kansas Studies Institute at Johnson County Community College, says Lyda finished her law degree in 1902, four years before the infamous appropriations act.
“One of the things I cover in my classes with my students is: How do people make change? And I think Lyda is a classic example of, ‘I've got to prepare on all kinds of fronts because I don't know what it's going to take to get this done,’” Edwards says.
In 1910, Lyda became the first Native American woman and the third woman in history to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. No male lawyer in Washington would agree to sponsor her, a requirement at the time, so she presented her 69-page legal brief as a plaintiff rather than as a licensed attorney.
She lost the case but continued to protect the land with such tactics as standing watch with a shotgun, lying in a ditch to physically block excavators, preparing to wrap herself in an American flag when soldiers appeared poised to shoot her and spending quite a bit of time behind bars.
Then, in 1913, U.S. Sen. Charles Curtis, a Kansas-born, enrolled citizen of the Kaw Nation who later served as Herbert Hoover’s vice president, pushed through federal legislation to protect the burial ground, using Lyda’s case and the popular support she had gained over the years.
The battle wasn’t over
The Conley sisters died between 1946 and 1958, and didn’t witness much, or any, of the era of threats that followed.
An ongoing dispute with the Wyandottes of Oklahoma, who obtained the deed to the land in 1955 — another book-worthy story — threatened the cemetery throughout the 1950s and 60s, and again in the 1990s and early 2000s.
But many Wyandots of Kansas were still around to fight.
“Our placenames remember things we don't, right?” Edwards says. “Wyandotte County is something we've all heard of, but people rarely think of it as being related to living people. And you know, there are Wyandots here.”
One of many Wyandots very much connected to the story, and to the cemetery, is Chief Emeritus Judith Trǫnyáęhk Manthe. Her great-great-grandfather was brother to the Conleys’ mother, making the sisters her first cousins three times removed.
Manthe says, when her ancestors were forced out of Ohio in the 1840s, a steamboat dropped them off in the West Bottoms.
“It had flooded a couple of years before that, so it was just swampy messiness,” Manthe says. “The first year, we lost 60 people, had no place to bury our dead. We looked for the highest hill, which was the Huron Cemetery. We simply wrapped them in blankets and buried them in mass graves.”
Since 1843, she says, all her ancestors are buried there.
“My third great-grandmother all the way down,” Manthe says, quickly noting two exceptions. Her grandmother and father died in the 1990s, when many Wyandots feared their remains would be relocated and preemptively chose to be buried elsewhere.
“I never want anything to happen to that place,” she says.
Aside from having relatives who continue the fight, Edwards says Lyda’s “trailblazing legal argument is today part of the basis for NAGPRA (Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act), which was passed in the 1990s to protect the burial grounds of Indigenous peoples.”
Lyda also left another kind of legacy.
In addition to teaching at Spalding Business College, being a telegraph operator, and helping Indigenous people with legal matters, Lyda taught men’s Sunday school at the Seventh Street Methodist Church for 50 years.
“In her obituary, they add extra text to talk about how many major male leaders of seminaries and of important congregations are former Sunday school students of hers,” Edwards says. “You can't find any of this to be coincidental, right? I mean, she's an activist, and she's training the people she educates to be activists, so she really has a deep reach in the Kansas City area community.”
Tai Edwards and Judith Manthe will discuss the Conley sisters and the new book “Lyda Conley and the Fight to Preserve Huron Indian Cemetery,” at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 15, at the Kansas City Public Library’s Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., Kansas City, Missouri 64105. The event is free with RSVP. More information at KCLibrary.org.
