Conley's Cause
When this controversy arose, the Wyandot descendants in Kansas City were considered an “absentee” or “citizen class” of the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma, and did not have legal control of the burial ground. In 1855 they had accepted United States citizenship and land allotments in Kansas. The burial ground had been excluded from the allotments, and as American Indian land, it was considered to be controlled by the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma, which has tribal government. The historic burying ground held Conley‘s maternal ancestors and others of both the present-day Wyandotte Nation of Kansas and the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma. The earliest burials dated to 1843, when the tribe had first come to Kansas.
Conley and her sisters strongly disagreed with the proposed sale. They erected a structure at the cemetery so they could live there around the clock and protect the burial ground. They took turns standing guard with muskets, and put up “No trespassing” signs around it.
Kansas City newspapers covered the controversy. Kansas City Times (October 25, 1906):
In this cemetery are buried one-hundred of our ancestors ... Why should we not be proud of our ancestors and protect their graves? We shall do it, and woe be to the man that first attempts to steal a body. We are part owners of the ground and have the right under the law to keep off trespassers, the right a man has to shoot a burglar who enters his home.
— Miss Lyda Conley
We shall keep right on asking bids for the property.
— J.B. Durant, Chairman of the Government commission that is trying to sell the cemetery
In 1907 Conley filed a petition in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Kansas for injunction against the government's authorization of sale. The court ruled against the Conleys, so she appealed. The case went to the Supreme Court of the United States, where Conley was allowed to argue the case directly before the court. Because she had not been admitted to the Supreme Court bar, she appeared in court acting in propria persona (in her own person). She was the first female Native American lawyer admitted before the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled in favor of the lower courts, which had determined the government's proposed action was legal.
As the case gained national attention, the Conley sisters worked to build other kinds of support. Women's clubs in Kansas City and similar associations strongly opposed development of the cemetery. US Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas, also of mixed Native American ancestry, introduced a bill in Congress that precluded the sale of the cemetery and made the land a national park. This was passed in 1916 and the cemetery was protected.
Read more about this topic: Lyda Conley