UMKC School of Law (original) (raw)

The Inns of UMKC

Lyda Conley (1874-1946)

Lyda Conley was born in 1874 as Eliza Burton Conley to Eliza Burton Zane Conley, a member of the Wyandotte Indian Tribe and Andrew Conley, an Englishmen. Lyda attended Park College and graduated from the Kansas City School of Law in 1902 with two other women. Lyda's life changed in 1906 when Congress authorized the Secretary of Interior to convey sacred Wyandotte Indian burial grounds where Lyda's ancestors were buried. This was unacceptable to Lyda and her sister Lena Conley, and the two erected a Fort at the Huron Place Cemetery and stood guard with muskets and posted trespassing signs throughout the cemetery. In 1907 Lyda filed a petition for injunction against government intervention in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Kansas and her case eventually came before the U.S. Supreme Court. Lyda argued the case pro se, having never been admitted to the Supreme Court Bar. Lyda was the first Native American woman lawyer and the first Native American woman to argue before the Supreme Court. The case received national attention. Although she lost when Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld the lower court's decision to dismiss the case she persevered in her fight and eventually Kansas Senator Charles Curtis introduced a bill in Congress that precluded the sale and made the land a national monument. The cemetery was placed on the National Historic Register in 1971, 25 years after Lyda Conley’s death in 1946.