Native American cemetery in Kansas City, Kan., is now a National Historic Landmark

If Quindaro Ruins supporters succeed in getting the area named a National Historic Landmark, it will become the second Wyandotte County site with the title.

Federal officials awarded the first in January to the Wyandotte National Burying Ground (Eliza Burton Conley Burial Site), a 2 1/2 -acre cemetery at North Seventh and Ann streets in downtown Kansas City, Kan. For decades, it has been called the Huron Indian Cemetery, after the name the French first called the tribe.

An estimated 400 to 600 people, mostly Wyandot Indians, are buried there in graves dating to 1843, the year they migrated here. They had expected to live on 148,000 acres that the government promised, but did not deliver, in exchange for their Ohio lands. They first settled in a swampy area near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers.

Disease quickly spread, killing about 1 in 7 of the tribe’s members. Survivors obtained the burial site from the Delaware, who already lived in what would become Wyandotte County.

The most famous grave belongs to Eliza Burton Conley, a lawyer who in 1910 became the first Native American and second woman to argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. She and her two sisters had set up a hut and lived near their parents’ graves to prevent developers from buying the land and moving the graves.

Conley became “the first to raise the legal argument that American Indian burying grounds are entitled to protection by the federal government, and the first to claim that the descendants of treaty signatories have the right to sue to enforce treaty provisions,” according to the National Park Service’s nomination for Historic Landmark status.

Though Conley lost the court battle, she still won. The developers gave up.

The Wyandotte Nation in Oklahoma, which two decades ago wanted to build a high-stakes bingo hall over the cemetery, plans to install a new sign, with the correct name, and also fence the property to better protect it, said Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Sherri Clemons.

This story was originally published February 26, 2017 at 8:09 PM with the headline "Native American cemetery in Kansas City, Kan., is now a National Historic Landmark."