"They were only two women, but the Conleys had lots of support. Compared with other tribes, the Wyandot women had strong roles. They had the job of choosing chiefs and keeping oral histories and laws. The Jesuits in Canada had tried to teach them to be submissive to their husbands, not realizing their hallowed tradition of being proud, ill-tempered and disobedient.

The Conley sisters stood their ground when women across the country were standing their ground. They did not yet have the vote, but they were protesting and gaining rights day by day: right to divorce, to own land, to practice law. Local women’s reading clubs expressed support for “the Conley girls.”"

Wyandot Fight For The Right To Rest In Peace

The Conley sisters were up on the cemetery hill with shotguns. Word of it flew around Kansas City, Kan., in 1906.

Fine ladies, those sisters. Good Kansas stock. Lyda and Lena commuted to college by rowing across the Missouri River. After graduation, Lyda taught telegraphy at the local business college and Sunday school at the Methodist church. She also passed the Missouri bar exam.

Now, these part-Wyandot women, both in their 40s, were ready to pass buckshot into the first person to disturb the graves of their ancestors.

Their own mother, Eliza Burton Zane Conley, was buried there. So were others descended from the founders of Zanesville, Ohio, and from the respected Chief Tarhe, leader of the Wyandot in Upper Sandusky.

The Indian burial ground in downtown Kansas City also held Wyandot- American veterans of the War of 1812, infants who died from measles during the journey from Ohio in 1843 and some 60 Indians who died homeless and fevered during their first cold months on flooded Kansas lowlands.

May they rest in peace.

Or else - the Conleys decided.

The Wyandot had other cemeteries. Quindaro, north and west of town, served Wyandots who once ran an underground railroad operation there. There was another in Oklahoma, where some 200 members of the tribe fled after the Civil War turned Kansas City into a brutal battleground.

But 63 years after the Wyandot came 1,000 miles from Ohio, the cemetery in Kansas City told their fullest story.

To many, like the Conleys, it was the tribe’s most sacred ground.

So when the Oklahoma Wyandotte tried to sell the Kansas City cemetery for profit and move remains elsewhere, the Kansas Wyandot were shaken to the core.

Permission for the transaction had appeared at the last minute within a congressional bill. Right after the bill passed, the government sent a team to Kansas City to take bids on the land.

Lyda and Lena didn’t waste a minute, either.

In the dark of a summer night, they slipped into the cemetery with a load of building supplies. They put “No Trespassing” signs on the graves of their relatives.

They built a shack with windows on all sides, got in and loaded both barrels.

Two American flags stood by as emergency armor. Should “the troops” show up, Lyda said, they would wrap themselves in the flags and dare them to shoot.

Strong women

They were only two women, but the Conleys had lots of support. Compared with other tribes, the Wyandot women had strong roles. They had the job of choosing chiefs and keeping oral histories and laws. The Jesuits in Canada had tried to teach them to be submissive to their husbands, not realizing their hallowed tradition of being proud, ill-tempered and disobedient.

The Conley sisters stood their ground when women across the country were standing their ground. They did not yet have the vote, but they were protesting and gaining rights day by day: right to divorce, to own land, to practice law. Local women’s reading clubs expressed support for “the Conley girls.”

Yet Lyda knew the sword was not always mightier than the law. She filed injunctions left and right to stop the sale. When those failed, she filed more, including the claim that the cemetery had been given to the tribe in a treaty. No court had ever recognized such a claim, and no court had ever recognized a “moral imperative” to save American Indian burial grounds.

Lyda lost those claims, too. Undaunted, she stepped up to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1909.

Only two women had argued in the country’s highest court, and Lyda couldn’t appear without a Washington lawyer to vouch for her abilities. She couldn’t find one and refused to let anybody else argue her case.

“No lawyer would plead for the grave of my mother as I could,” she said.

She decided to argue as a citizen rather than a lawyer.

In preparing her argument for cemetery preservation, she wrote, “I cannot believe that this is superstitious reverence, any more than I can believe that the reverence every true American has for the grave of Washington at Mount Vernon is a superstitious reverence.”

The court was impressed, but unconvinced. It ruled the treaty was not legally enforceable. The United States “was bound . . . only by honor, not by law.”

Still, Lyda and Lena had won the war. They had developed such a strong following in town that anyone trying to buy the cemetery would face a solid fence of public opposition.

The cemetery was safe. For a while.

A new battle begins

The Oklahoma Wyandotte tried several times to sell the cemetery, but things did not get as hot until some 90 years after the Conley stand.

In the 1990s, the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma decided to build a casino in Kansas. Of the four Wyandot Nations - also in Kansas, Michigan and Canada - the Oklahoma group is the only tribe recognized by the U.S. government. They claim certain downtown lands still belong to them, including the cemetery. Word got around that, if necessary, they would build a casino right on top of the graves.

A collective gasp came from the Kansas City community and drew headlines across the country. The Kansas Wyandot were enraged, still burying their dead on this last scrap of shared land.

Other shared land had disappeared long ago. The federal government started dismantling Indian reservations in the 1850s, dividing them into individual family farms for tribe members and selling off the rest. Tribal governments were expected to disband as well.

Not all tribes lost their reservations, but the Kansas Wyandot did. Over the decades, their small shared cemetery became more dear.

Leaford Bearskin, current chief of the Oklahoma tribe, said his group never intended to build a casino on the cemetery, and that the idea was cooked up and spread by casino opponents.

But Harold Walker, the city’s law director, said he heard the tribe’s lawyers talk about building on the cemetery. Walker believed the Oklahoma tribe did it to get attention. They are one of several former Kansas tribes attempting to build casinos in the city.

Relations between the Oklahoma and Kansas tribes grew threadbare through the ordeal.

But in 1999, after the cemetery casino idea had died, representatives of the four Wyandot nations met in Midland, Mich., for reconciliation.

And today they work together, all Wyandot.

An evening of peace

On an early evening in June, most of downtown Kansas City is a canyon of concrete shadows. The golden light of late day catches the hilltop cemetery, seeming to burnish every leaf, every blade of grass. Janith English, principal chief of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, has come from her modest home in the suburbs for her one- woman cemetery cleanup duty, armed with trash bags and disinfectant wipes.

The city’s rare green space lures kids looking for summer shade. It brings the homeless to the shelter of a low stone wall around the Garrett family grave site. A trumpeter shows up to practice a lyrical solo to empty city sidewalks.

English picks up empty quart beer bottles and fast-food wrappers. Her tall and broad-shouldered frame moves purposefully in the warm light as she scans the grass with her delicate yet fiery blue eyes.

She would prefer not to talk about the cemetery casino proposal.

“It was nasty, bitter, and it’s in the past,” she says.

Neither will she talk about what happened at the reconciliation, although she says it was meaningful.

“I never knew how powerful forgiveness could be,” she says.

English sits, remembering sack lunches here with her Aunt Edith, who would tell stories about the great Wyandot leader Chief Tarhe and her other ancestors.

English is French and English, too. But her aunt’s stories made her feel more Wyandot than anything else.

“Timeless,” is the word she uses to describe the feeling.

If English had her way, her tribe would regain their federal recognition. They filed a petition 11 years ago, becoming one of hundreds of tribes still waiting for an answer. Unlike the Oklahoma group, which runs several businesses for the benefit of its tribe, the Kansas nation is not interested in gaming.

But they are interested in establishing a health center for urban Indians who do not receive reservation health benefits. They would like to support a tribal inventor developing a green energy project. And they would like to publish information on the Wyandot culture. There is not one Wyandot left who knows how to converse in the native language.

English favors reconciliation with church, state and other Indians, even if some tribes find such ceremonies to be too little, too late.

“People are isolated by guilt and shame,” says the mental-health nurse. “Separation from others means a separation from God. Dealing with our own mistakes frees us to strive for the best in ourselves and in everyone.”

Could this have been true in Ohio 160 years ago?

English knows it would have been difficult. One people wanted to share the land, and another wanted to cut it in pieces.

“But if we can look at our history now and discuss it dispassionately, I believe we can learn from each other,” she says.

“If the Creator desires that we all live in harmony, who is to say it’s impossible? What do we have unless we hold onto our faith and hope?”

English says she wants to be buried in this cemetery. She looks around the old green space.

“I’d like to see it fenced in,” she says.