TEN WOMEN IN U.S. LEGAL HISTORY #6: Elizabeth “Lyda” Burton Conley (c. 1869 – c. 1946) was the first Native American female attorney in the United States, and the first woman admitted to the Kansas bar, graduating from Kansas City School of Law in 1902. Conley was the granddaughter of Isaac Zane, who had been captured as a child by the Wyandot and adopted into their tribe, making her one-sixteenth Wyandot. Conley became an attorney in order to protect her tribe’s burial land (Huron Park Indian Cemetery) from being sold. So passionate was she about the cause, she, along with her sisters, erected a structure at the cemetery so that they could live there around the clock and protect the land, taking turns standing guard with muskets. In 1907, Conley filed a petition in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Kansas for an injunction against the government’s authorization of sale. Conley lost, so she appealed and went before the U.S. Supreme Court. Because she had not been admitted to the Supreme Court bar, Conley appeared acting in propria persona (in her own person), thus becoming the first female Native American lawyer to appear before the U.S. Supreme Court. Although she lost in court each time, in 1916 a bill was introduced in the Kansas State Congress – and secured – that precluded the sale of the cemetery and designated it as a federal park. Conley remained a protector of the land for the remainder of her life, acting as a guardian over the cemetery. She died in 1946 and is buried near her family in the cemetery, which is now called Wynadot Burying Ground.