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 that illuminates 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.

Omakyehstih Collective we are gathered together has been commissioned as the lead artists for this project. Learn more about the collective and view an abridged version of their concept, design plans and interpretation by clicking here.

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 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.

Read Our April 8, 2025 Press Release Here.

"Trespass at Your Peril!" —Conley Sisters

  • "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!