NOW OPEN!

Visit the monument at the Wyandotte County Historical Museum extended through November 18, 2025. Visit the HUB for more info.

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Trespassers Beware! Fort Conley and
Wyandot Women Warriors

Co-directed by the Wyandot Nation of Kansas and Monumenta, in collaboration with lead artists Omakyehstih Collective, Trespassers Beware! Fort Conley and Wyandot Women Warriors is a mobile monument that illuminates the story of the Wyandot Conley sisters who occupied their family's cemetery to save it from urban development. The monument re-imagines Fort Conley, the small dwelling the sisters built inside the Wyandot National Burying Ground and lived in for years to defend their family’s graves. Their decades-long activism and legal arguments protected this sacred land and contributed to preservation and tribal sovereignty movements.

This traveling commemorative public art work is a multimedia installation based on a replica of the historic Fort, which includes original video, performance, music, writing, interpretation, oral histories and more.

The Trespassers Beware! monument was unveiled on August 30, 2025 at the Wyandotte County Historical Museum. Chief Judith Manthe of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas dedicated the work, with Neysa Page-Lieberman of Monumenta, and Bettizane “BZ” Smith Mendidehtih (Wyandotte), Justine K. Smith (Wyandotte) and Rane Wilson (Wyandotte, Maya) of the Omakyehstih Collective. This mobile monument is traveling to multiple sites within the Kansas City metro through fall 2026. See the tour schedule at the HUB.

Trespassers Beware! is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Arts / ArtsHERE, in partnership with Mid-America Arts Alliance, Mellon Foundation, Humanities Kansas, Kansas Studies Institute at Johnson County Community College, Kansas Arts Commission and individual donors.

For more details, visit the Fort Conley HUB where you can get a free download of the exhibition catalogue, meet the whole team involved in creating Trespassers Beware!, learn more about the artists’ concept, grab a press packet, and more.

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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)

  • "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!

  • "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!