How should we think about USA 250? Kansan Lyda Conley and her Wyandot relatives provide an answer.

A passage from the Declaration of Independence is seen on display May 8, 2018, at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew DeMillo/Arkansas Advocate)

Wander through a grocery store today and you’re bound to see USA 250 branded merchandise, such as star-shaped tater tots, “together we grill” charcoal briquets (emblazoned with a bald eagle), and bags of Doritos “celebrating 250 years of America.”

Beneath this semiquincentennial commercialism, fundamental questions remain: What is the meaning of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? How should we think about USA 250?

One answer emerges in the story of Lyda Conley, Wyandot Nation of Kansas member and lifelong Kansan.

University Press of Kansas

Wyandots were forcibly removed from their homes in Ohio in the wake of Congress’ Indian Removal Act of 1830. The federal government had guaranteed a 148,000-acre reservation in the Treaty of 1842, but when the Wyandots arrived in what is today Kansas, they discovered the federal government had already allocated that land to other forcibly removed tribes, rendering the Wyandots homeless.

Ethnic cleansing, what Americans like to call “removal,” is always deadly because farming and food provision is disrupted in both the old homes and the new ones, compounded by despair and loss. The Wyandots were no exception, and once they bought land, they needed to quickly establish a burial ground, known as the Huron Indian Cemetery (French colonizers had long called the Wyandots “Hurons”).

Once Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, the federal government commenced “removing” Indigenous nations again. Wyandots were given two choices: remain in Kansas on small individually owned pieces of their reservation (known as allotments) and relinquish Wyandot citizenship for U.S. citizenship, or move again, to what we now call Oklahoma.

This split the nation into the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma and the Wyandot Nation of Kansas.

 

First Kansas generation

Lyda Conley, and her sisters Ida and Helena, were part of the first generation of Wyandots born in Kansas. They grew up on a farm on their mother’s allotment in modern day Wyandotte County.

By the time they reached adulthood, the three sisters had endured the deaths of their oldest sister, Sallie, both of their parents, and their maternal grandmother. These relations were buried in the Huron Indian Cemetery, which by the 1890s lay in the heart of downtown Kansas City, Kansas.

The Treaty of 1855 (the same one that at divided the Wyandots between Kansas and Oklahoma) stated that “the portion now enclosed and used as a public burying-ground, shall be permanently reserved and appropriated for that purpose.” But numerous efforts involving politicians, local businessmen, federal agents and Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma members culminated in Congress passing legislation in 1906 that authorized relocating the Huron Cemetery’s burials and selling the land for commercial development.

When similar sale schemes had emerged in the past, Wyandots in Kansas had banded together to resist. In 1906, the resistance was led by Lyda, Ida, and Helena Conley.

 

Cemetery court battle

In 1902, Lyda graduated from Kansas City School of Law (in Missouri), one of only three women in her class of 67. She was admitted to the Missouri bar that same year, and the Kansas bar in 1910.

In the wake of Congress allowing the cemetery’s sale, Lyda commenced her legal fight, writing: “I believe that an historic interest should be manifested in preserving this burial ground and I feel that the government has neither moral nor legal right to disturb the sleepers there. I am sure that if it was the bones of George Washington resting in this beautiful spot, there is not a councilman here who would think of disturbing them. Why not accord these early settlers and their living progeny an equal consideration?”

Lyda eventually took these arguments all the way to the nation’s highest court.

In 1910, she became the first Indigenous woman, and the third woman in history, to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Though she lost the case, her legal arguments demanding the federal government uphold treaties and preserve Indigenous burials in Huron Cemetery laid the groundwork for many aspects of federal Indian law that tribal nations use to protect their sovereignty today.

Lyda and her sisters knew they couldn’t rely exclusively on the U.S. justice system. While Lyda pursued her legal fight, she and her sisters — with the help of other local Wyandots — built a shack in the cemetery to secure it, round-the-clock, from vandalism and sale.

For six straight years, and on and off thereafter, at least one sister occupied what they called “Fort Conley,” right next to their mother’s grave.

As Lyda told a local reporter: “I will not see my people so robbed of their rights and the bodies of their dead taken from the sacred burying ground of the tribe in defiance of the treaty because there is no one to stand up for the rights of the Indians. I have tried to save the cemetery from being desecrated by law, and now I will take care of it myself, law or no law.”

Though Lyda lost her Supreme Court case, her and her sisters’ advocacy gained so much media attention and notoriety that U.S. Sen. Charles Curtis of Kansas, also of Indigenous descent (Kaw Nation), proposed legislation that, after its passage in 1913, stopped the sale of the cemetery.

 

Telling the story

I am also a lifelong Kansan and I never learned about Lyda Conley until long after I earned my doctorate in history.

That’s why Stephanie Bennett (of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas), Samantha Gill (historian and librarian at the Hays Public Library), and I have just published the first book-length examination of this story: “Lyda Conley and the Fight to Preserve Huron Indian Cemetery.” The text includes biography, transcribed news articles and legal documents, as well as oral histories with Wyandot (Kansas) and Wyandotte (Oklahoma) members, family photographs, and excerpts from a theatrical play about the Conleys.

The book also traces how controversies over the cemetery continued into the 21st century.

After Congress allowed tribal nations to engage in gaming, Wyandot Nation of Kansas members fought again — just like the Conleys — to preserve the last resting place of their relatives from being turned into a casino. Familiar Kansans such as Sam Brownback and Daniel Wildcat appear in this contemporary part of the story.

 

Back to the founding

So how does this help us understand the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States?

At the most basic level, Wyandot history and Lyda Conley’s life chronicle many significant moments in our national, state, and local past. But on a deeper level, this story teaches us about historical memory — how individuals, communities, and entire nations remember, or forget, what’s come before. And at what cost.

Macy Bennett of the Wyandot Nation said in an oral history for the book that Lyda was “making good from bad. (She was) willing to fight for memory, to fight for honor. … And now that story of resisting erasure has become an inspiring one in ways that it wouldn’t have if there hadn’t been that fight in the first place.”

In other words, the Conley sisters fought to protect their family’s sacred burials, they demanded that at least part of a treaty (which the Constitution calls the “supreme law of the land”) be upheld, and they mounted absolute “resistance to being forgotten.” Macy implored others to embrace that same type of “determination and sense of honor for what’s come before and (be) willing to fight for that in the present.”

Wyandot Nation Chief Emeritus Janith English, also interviewed in the text, described the Conleys’ work as the embodiment of “true freedom,” which “is the right to self-determination and a willingness to advocate for the rights of others.” Those two parts are essential: ability to freely pursue one’s happiness while fighting for the same for those to whom equality is denied.

Without this, English warned, “conflict and chaos will reappear.”

In 2026, let’s celebrate our nation by remembering the fights for freedom in our shared past, both before the law and on the ground, while also fighting for those rights for everyone around us.

Tai Edwards is a historian and educator in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.