Announcing 2025-2026 Tour Schedule
The Trespassers Beware! monument will travel to multiple communities, beginning in the Kansas City metro with the following project partners. More locations and partners will be added after the launch tour.
Trespassers Beware! Fort Conley and Wyandot Women Warriors is a commemorative public art project - set to debut in fall 2025 - that will illuminate the story of the Wyandot Conley sisters who occupied the historic Wyandot National Burying Ground in Kansas City, Kansas, saving it from urban development and erasure. Their decades-long activism and legal arguments protected this sacred land and contributed to preservation and tribal sovereignty movements.
Trespassers Beware! re-imagines Fort Conley, a small dwelling the sisters built inside the Wyandot cemetery and lived in for years to defend their family’s sacred resting place. This monumental public art work is being designed as a “mobile monument” which will travel to multiple sites within the Kansas City metro. The artist collective selected to create this public artwork is Omakyehstih Collective we are gathered together. To learn more about the artists and to view an abridged version of their concept, design plans and interpretation simply click on the link provided below.
This project is co-led by The Wyandot Nation of Kansas and Monumenta, and in partnership with Kansas City Repertory Theatre.
Trespassers Beware! is generously funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts / ArtsHERE, Humanities Kansas, Kansas Arts Commission and individual donors.
"Trespass at Your Peril!" —Conley Sisters
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"I will go to Washington and personally defend it... If I do not then there is no cemetery in this land safe from sale, at the will of the government.”
Lyda Burton Conley, Attorney, first Native American woman to argue a case for the U.S. Supreme Court (pictured with sister with Helena Conley and cousin Nina Craig)
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"They said, ‘We’re going into battle.’ They shut and locked the gates, and hung a sign: ‘Trespassers beware.’ They built a shack called Fort Conley."
Judith Manthe, Chief, Wyandot Nation of Kansas, Co-Director of Trespassers Beware!
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"They worked in a system designed to keep them out. No one was prepared for Native women living outside society’s constraints, so they were uniquely positioned to barrel through the roadblocks."
Madeline Easley, Wyandotte of Oklahoma playwright, theatre artist, collaborator on Trespassers Beware!
Image captions: (top) Trespassers Beware! design by Macy Bennett © 2024; (images with quotes, left to right) 1. Conley Family - Helena Conley, Lyda Conley, and Nina Craig (cousin), 1930, Courtesy Wyandot Nation of Kansas Archives, 2. Chief Judith Manthe at Wyandot National Burying Ground, ph: Suzanne Hogan KCUR 89.3, 2020; 3. Playwright Madeline Easley and Chief Manthe at the Kansas City Kansas Public Library, reviewing Wyandot collection; ph: Stuart Carden, 2023.
Image grid: (fist row, left to right) Courtesy of Wyandot Nation of Kansas Archives: 1. Lyda Conley pictured in top row first left, 2. Lyda Conley, Place of Employment, 3. Conley Sister Home 1712 N. 3rd; (second row, left to right) Courtesy of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas Archives: 4. Huron Indian Cemetery Map; 5 & 6. Fort Conley, Courtesy of Kansas Room Special Collections, Kansas City, Kansas Public Library; (third row, left to right) Courtesy of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas Archives: 7. Don Ballou painting of the Conley Sisters, 1956; 8. Lyda Conley in a ditch protecting the cemetery; 9. The Wyandot National Burying Ground, Photo by Suzanne Hogan KCUR 89.3, 2020.; (fourth row, left to right) Courtesy of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas Archives: 10. Conley family grave markers at Wyandot National Burying Ground,; 11. Ottawa Chief, White Cloud, imploring to the Great Spirit near COnley family grave markers; 12. Lyda Conley’s funeral May 1946; (fifth row, left to right) 13. Grave marker for Lyda Conley, Courtesy of Neysa Page-Lieberman; 14. Grave marker for Helena Conley, Courtesy of Kansas Room Special Collections, KCKPL; 15. Ida Conley grave marker, Courtesy of Kansas Room Special Collections, KCKPL.