This is my great grandparents, Ebenezer O. and Canna Cale.

And then we'll go to my great-great grandparents.

Thank you for everything you've done for us.

And my third great grandmother, Hannah Zane.

And here lies Eliza Burton Conley, my cousin, who is also known as Lyda Conley.

The Wyandots came from Ontario, and before the Europeans came, we were like 70,000 strong.

They brought diseases with them.

Smallpox, measles.

It wiped us down to probably less than a couple of thousand people.

My family went along through Georgian Bay, went down into Detroit.

We settled in Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

So we had a mill.

We had churches, we had schools.

We had everything, we were living as the white men did.

We were kind of sucked in to the whole Indian Removal Act process.

We want land.

We want it free.

How do you get it?

Oh, look at this wonderful land.

Well, we get the people who own it or live there out.

We thought when 1830 came that we would be able to convince the government that we had assimilated so much that we should be able to stay in Ohio.

Almost all Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi River were eventually forcibly removed west of the Mississippi River.

So a treaty in 1842 is basically the fulfillment of the Indian Removal Act for Wyandots specifically.

So the U.S.

government promised the Wyandots that they would have reservation in what we now call Kansas.

We walked from Upper Sandusky down to Cincinnati, Ohio.

We boarded the Republic and the Nodaway.

But when the Wyandots physically arrive, they find that the land that had been promised to them had already been distributed to other forcibly removed tribes in the wake of the Indian Removal Act.

Being dumped, and, you know, having nothing, not the land we were promised.

And we had not only given up our land,but we had given up annuity that we were supposed to get per year to move to Kansas.

And then we contacted with the Delaware Indians and asked them to sell some of their land.

The next year, a great flood came through.

That first year, flooded 8 to 10ft.

It's winter time.

They said when the water receded you had cows hanging from the trees.

So we ended up getting sick.

So they looked for the highest ground, which was across the river, and then the Delawares gave them that land for the cemetery.

So we simply took our people to the Huron Cemetery, wrapped them in blankets and buried them in mass graves.

So that's already a third of our people.

664 left Ohio, and we've already lost 160.

So in 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opens what we call today Kansas and Nebraska, to non-Native settlement.

And then in 1855, theres a treaty with the Wyandots to dispossess them of their land.

It said it was going to eliminate the Wyandot Nation, basically, the government.

It was also set to lot the land that was available.

And it also reserved certain lands for particular purposes.

It reserved the Huron Place Cemetery to protect it.

So the Wyandots are told you can either stay and take an allotment, which means an individually owned small piece of your reservation, or we could remain Native American and go to Oklahoma.

A lot of our leaders and people took their allotted lands.

They claimed citizenship.

So you basically have some of the Wyandots say, I'm not moving again because Im not suffering like that again.

And what quickly becomes clear is a lot of the terms of that treaty, not only are they eventually not upheld, but, many of them had been misled on what taking a Kansas allotment meant.

And they eventually figure it out in the 1860s that the federal government is treating Wyandots now is no longer members of their Indigenous nation.

They're treating them as individual U.S.

citizens.

So you have another treaty in 1867,which is supposed to remedy basically the flaws of 1855.

The incompetents is what they called them, the ones that could not speak English, the ones that had no businesses or jobs and a lot of the upper people wanted to go to Oklahoma and have the government take care of them.

So they left and went to Oklahoma.

But Lydas family, wanted to reclaim their Wyandot citizenship in the Treaty of 1867, and they did what the federal government asked of them.

They made sure that they were documented in the correct paperwork.

They made sure they met with the right people.

And right there on that roll is Lyda Conleys mother.

We stayed because we had businesses.

We had the cemetery.

So when we think about Lyda in terms of Wyandot history, she's one of the first generation that's born in Kansas Lyda was named after her mother, Eliza Burton Conley Sr.

She lives with her family on an allotment, and where they lived in the Nearman area is right in one of the bends of the Missouri River.

And one of the floods in Lydas life actually destroys the allotment.

Now, there were four girls in the family, and as was unfortunately common in the time you have early death even among young people.

Her mother died in 1879, and then sister Sallie died in 1880, just eight months apart from each other.

Later, their father died and then their grandmother died.

And this was all within five years.

She was in her teen years when she was completely on her own with her two sisters.

So in the 1890s, there were efforts to sell the property that was the cemetery.

And they start talking about exhuming bodies and moving them to another cemetery and selling the grounds because that's really when Kansas City, there was a huge boom.

And so there was a demand for the land, and everything was popping up around and all these municipal buildings and different establishments.

And then here sets this two acres of land.

And that is what they saw as just a plot of land that they could establish on.

And you see numerous Wyandots, they create organizations, they work together.

So Lyda and her sisters would have seen the generation before them defending the cemetery from the exact things that eventually Lyda has to do.

Lyda learned, what is the game?

What do I need to know?

She had already gotten her undergraduate degree from Parkville, rowing across the Missouri River but then she took it from the Kansas City Law School.

So she went to law school, and she was one of three women in her graduating class.

She passed the Missouri Bar in 1902 and then she passed the Kansas Bar in 1910.

So she had licenses and law degrees to actually practice law in both states.

This was a time where it was not common for women to go to law school, or even be admitted into law school.

Harvard, for example, wasnt admitting women into law school at this time.

She had the tenacity and the spirit, she was just a go-getter.

She knew that this was going to come to a battle.

Her people were at risk of being dug up.

How dare anybody dig them up.

When Congress passes the Act in 1906 that legally authorizes the sale of the cemetery, they name a commission.

And there was actually an effort by the local city government to buy it.

So there was this big debate because the local city government didn't want to spend what the commissioners believed the property was worth.

And it's actually that divide that delays things long enough for Lyda to effectively fight.

It's a year from that that Lyda her first legal challenge.

And she's doing things that are very legally creative for the time.

Shes demanding that a treaty be upheld.

So she's one of the first individuals to sue the federal government to demand that a treaty be upheld.

She also is well-educated enough to know that treaties are rarely upheld.

So she also does other things to try to make her legal argument strong.

So one is being physically present on the cemetery grounds.

And that's what they did by erecting the shack, which was six by eight.

So think about that.

That's a very tiny shack for these three women to physically inhabit.

And they have it occupied during all seasons.

No running water, no heat.

And I mean, it was no different than living in a tent.

And for them to do that for not a week or two, but 5 or 6 years.

Sometimes law enforcement would tear it down and intentionally destroy all the boards so they couldn't be used for rebuilding.

And early after she gets her law degree, she spends most of her job time as a lawyer.

She has to have other employment to actually support herself, but she does most of her legal work just doing routine legal matters for other Wyandots in the region And then she also was a teacher at what was called Spalding Business College.

By today's standards, would be considered a professor.

She didn't marry and she didn't have children.

And her and her sisters worked together, both in terms of how they earned money and pooled their resources and physically supported each other.

So I think that her intellect is what you see tying this all together and then her and her sisters willingness to literally use their labor and use their bodies to get it done.

And they're willing to really take on anyone who they think is causing trouble in the cemetery.

And they are on record of chasing passersby with sticks and shouting at them.

They're carrying around their dads unloaded “but they dont tell anyone” Civil War shotgun.

And so you see Lyda cursing mayors.

You see Helena cursing mayors.

She's the one that said, you know, “trespassers beware”.

But it said that the curses that she gave to people that violated the cemetery actually, befell too.

They showed a force of determination that they were never going to leave.

No matter what happens, we are here, and you are going to have to fight us if you want to take this land from us.

And the news media was really interested in embracing her story.

Most of the negative news coverage early on is actually from members of the commission who keep saying, “well, we're going to do it, but we still have Lyda Conley to deal with, or we still have Miss Conley we going to have to contend with”.

They're complaining about her because she's being effective.

She was acting within the law.

She was not shooting anybody.

So she's using that, saying that I'm physically on the property so I should have legal right to what happens to it.

Which if you think about Kansas history, that's what squatters were doing on Wyandot and other Indigenous nations lands in this state.

And so she's really turning that on its head.

So when Lyda files her original brief in 1907, in federal district court in Kansas, it's pretty obvious, and legal scholars have said this, that it doesn't seem like she got a fair hearing.

The rejections of her proposals happen within a day, so it seems like they were pretty set on rejecting her arguments from the beginning, but there was no reason to not take it to its furthest place.

She couldn't get a credentialed lawyer who was allowed to testify in front of the U.S.

Supreme Court, who was a man, that was all there was at the time, to sponsor her, to actually argue her case as a lawyer in front of the Supreme Court.

So even though the whole brief is hers, she has to actually testify as a private citizen in order to get in front of the Supreme Court.

I feel like looking at the news articles at the time, really kind of paint the picture of the uphill battle she had to fight.

Just like anyone else in the public eye, I think at some point they look at you with admiration and you're this new shiny thing and everyone's oohing and ahhing and then it gets to a certain point that you lose favor with the public, and then you become open for criticism.

You have this sort of conflict in American culture at the time of wanting to view Indigenous peoples as people of the past, people that are sort of, primitive, pre-modern versions of the humanity they're living with, and vanishing, right.

So these stereotypes are kind of all layered on top of Lyda and she'll use that when it's effective to her and reject it when it isn't.

The most common references in her Supreme Court testimony are biblical.

She's a lifelong Methodist.

Her Christian faith is clearly extremely important to her in many aspects of her life.

And then she basically equates Indigenous sacred views of burial with Christian sacred views of burial.

Her legal arguments is that Indigenous burial grounds should be treated the same as any other burial ground.

That we wouldn't dig up George Washington or a founding father's grave, so we shouldn't dig up a founding father of Kansas City, Kansas, either.

It was often called Wyandotte City at the time.

Theyre the founding fathers of that community.

I think they were struck by her testimony but they could have charged her, and they dismissed that because they respected the fact that she knew what she was doing.

They they were moved, I think its fair to say by her arguments, but they didn't find them legally defensible.

And she loses at the Supreme Court, which I suspect Lyda was not entirely surprised by because she lost at the lower court level.

The Supreme Court and the lower federal courts ruled that she couldn't personally make a claim to preserving the cemetery because the federal government at the time only would engage with the Wyandottes who had moved to Oklahoma in the wake of the Treaty of 1855.

And the Wyandottes in Oklahoma at the time, did not embrace Wyandots of Kansas as members of their nation either.

So you see both a legal division and a social and cultural division, and actually one of the three members of the commission that the Act of 1906 appoints to sell the land, is a member of the Wyandotte of Oklahoma Nation.

And so Lyda is told you cannot make this claim because you're not considered a member of that group.

And of course, the reason she's not considered a member of that group was because of federal failure to accurately document her mother and families claim to be members of that nation in the Treaty of 1867.

That was a huge part of her argument, that her mother said, “I was supposed to be on this roll”.

And they had claimed that when they came and they did the roll that they were supposed to be on the absentee side.

Well, that never happened, clerical issue as it might have been.

“How dare you say that Im not Wyandot.” “I am.” And I think they respected her, but I just don't think that they cared enough to uphold the treaty.

The view at the time was that treaties did not have to be upheld as the supreme Law of the Land, even though the Constitution says that.

And the Supreme Court will eventually say, they are not legally bound, only honor bound, to uphold a treaty with an Indigenous nation.

And I can only imagine for Lyda what a defeat that would have been.

Because the Treaty of 1855 explicitly states that the cemetery that we know of as Huron Cemetery in downtown KCK would be preserved as a burial ground permanently.

I think the courts knew that they had to be on top of Indigenous people to eradicate them, to get rid of them.

So in this era, women are working in social organizations and political organizations for all kinds of things they believe are important, including the right to vote, because they had trouble voicing their political agendas in other ways.

So other women's groups would support Lyda sending money in some cases.

She got mail all the time.

People encouraging her, people, just, “how are you doing”?

“Just checking on you.” “I'm going to be in town tomorrow.

Are you going to be there?” I mean, just little short, tiny notes.

But people cared about her.

And at the time, a senator from Kansas was Charles Curtis, who also is someone with a really unique biography.

He's Kanza, Kaw Nation, grew up part of his life on the Kaw reservation in Kansas.

Then in 1913, he does get a bill passed that does eventually save the cemetery, for now.

It stopped the fight right then, gave them a little bit of relief.

Here's two people that lived in two worlds, and they went the way of assimilation, but they never lost their native spirit and their knowledge and who shaped them the most.

So after the Act of 1913 that protects the cemetery, the city is supposed to maintain the cemetery like any other cemetery or like a public park.

And that to the city meant different things than it did to the Conley sisters.

The city didnt understand the limits of the cemetery, and I think very well could have hit bodies.

They would want to build a retaining wall or they would want to replant shrubbery, and from Lydas perspective, all of that disturbs graves.

And she's probably right, because most of the graves in that cemetery were and are unmarked.

So she opposed it, and she would sit in a ditch if she needed to.

Sitting in that ditch and absolutely throwing out all of the surveyor's tools, she would mess with everything, just totally irritating everybody.

She didn't really care, to be honest.

She was jailed on a couple occasions.

She spent ten days in jail.

“You can have a $10 fine or ten days in jail.” “Well, I'll take the ten days in jail.” And when she came out of jail, she's on the arm of the the officer, and she has a grin on her face that just is amazing.

She knew she did what she set out to do, but she did not allow anybody to push her around, and that's why she was in jail so often.

They protested a funeral.

So there was a white guy whose sister was married to a Wyandot man.

So when her brother dies, she wants to bury him there.

And Lyda didn't approve of that.

She really felt that it should just be for members of the Wyandot Nation.

The Conley sisters are literally like, over my dead body.

The funeral has to be delayed, but he ends up being buried there.

So I think they knew even when we fight, we don't always win.

So we have to fight a lot, because if we don't fight at all we're going to lose all of this.

And I think you might have had local people at the time thinking it was absurd, maybe thinking this was, you know, taking it too far.

A lot of people thought she was crazy.

Some people didn't even want to be connected to her because of she lived in a cemetery for a time.

But I think from Lydas perspective, taking a little means taking a lot, especially when it came to land.

So anything that would desecrate burials was just getting closer to desecrating all the burials.

So Lyda is so emblematic of so many important things when we think about U.S.

Indigenous history.

And near the end of her life, some of her family members reported that she would spend a lot of her time at the Kansas City Public Library.

She would be at the library reading.

She took nuts and waters to the squirrels in the cold weather to make sure that the animals were taken care of.

She was walking home when someone we do not know who, hit her in the back of the head with a brick, all for 20 cents in her purse.

She died the next day.

It does beg the question of, is Lydas life of challenging the loss of Wyandot sovereignty, even part of her death?

You know was she targeted because of this?

We can't know, and so we can't separate it today.

But what we see in Lydas death is just an overwhelming community outpouring among many people far beyond Wyandot community members.

And hundreds of people attend, right.

So they end up talking in the newspapers the next day about how traffic is snarled downtown.

She's buried in the Huron Cemetery.

Of the three sisters that fought for the cemetery, she's the first to pass away, even though she's the youngest in birth order.

In her obituary, you know, they describe the normal things you would expect in an obituary.

But then there's actually separate sections where they talk about how many prominent men that go on to lead either Yale Divinity School or really important churches across the country came out of her Sunday school classes.

But one of the things that she did professionally that I find really profound is she represented Indigenous men incarcerated at Leavenworth in their clemency appeals.

And the letters these guys send her again, are also super powerful.

I mean, they talk about her and the times she comes to meet them at the prison.

And at least for two examples that I looked at, she, along with the members of their nation reduced their sentences by decades.

You know, these are really important parts of her life that go beyond just being the first Indigenous woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court.

The fight never really ends.

Even after 1913, when Charles Curtis has that bill passed, you would think, well, okay, we're done.

We're safe.

We're good to go.

In the 1940s, it comes back around again, the possibility of selling the land.

They wanted to build an underground parking lot, which obviously would be a problem for the the cemetery.

In fact, between when Lyda dies and her sister Helena dies, Helena is actually nervous that they're gonna destroy the cemetery again.

She even reportedly considers not being buried with her entire family over the property she defended her whole life because she's worried they're going to move it.

And so you can see that the fight never really ended, but because they were so consistent, it meant people never forgot.

Since 1855, the federal government has refused to recognize Wyandots in Kansas as tribal members and as a sovereign entity.

And so the only Indigenous nation that the federal government recognizes with ties to that property are the Wyandottes of Oklahoma.

And all Indigenous peoples, right, whether it's Wyandots in Kansas or it's Wyandottes in Oklahoma, end up being enormously strapped for economic resources because they are not compensated again and again for the resources that the United States acquires from them and that creates economic marginalization.

And so they wanted to engage in gaming, and they wanted to engage in gaming in Kansas.

Then they talked publicly about using the cemetery land or building above it.

They continued, the Tribe of Oklahoma, to get action to basically put this, to avoid NAGPRA by putting a casino on stilts, and that somehow by doing that, that it would avoid the interference with our religious and cultural exercise of that area.

That emergency situation actually gave us the fight.

The Zane siblings got law degrees that they ended up using.

We used media.

We wrote letters to politicians.

We physically, in some ways, occupied the cemetery by cleaning it up and showing ownership and pride in the cemetery.

So Wyandots in Kansas, along with some other tribal partners of other Indigenous nations in the state, work with the the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma to eventually draft an agreement of how they're going to handle the cemetery long term.

And the plan then, is that no structures will be built on the cemetery property, no gaming will take place there.

And it said that it's not just the the land, it's the land below, on and above that is protected, and should, just like the 1855 Treaty, should for all times be a cemetery and nothing more.

And the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma eventually obtains an adjacent property, and they open their casino in that facility.

Without her, it's very arguable that the cemetery wouldn't exist And a lot of indigenous nations that have been forced to move don't have a place.

And the Wyandots in Kansas still do have one place where their identity is rooted and so much of their consequential history and our consequential local history, remains.

She cited a specific occasion, when she stood in the cemetery in the presence of William Rockhill Nelson, the founder of the Kansas City Star.

At that time, Mr.

Nelson is quoted as having said, “We will get this cemetery.

We will get it, it will be gone and buildings will stand where it stands today.” And she had told him, quote, “You will not get this cemetery.

This cemetery will stand here long after you and your family and your palatial family home has disappeared.”