Margaret Bonga Fahlstrom (c. 1797 – February 6, 1880) was a mixed-race woman of African and Ojibwe descent who came from a fur trading family in the Great Lakes region.

[13] As a young man, Pierre worked for fur trader John Sayer in the Fond du Lac area south and west of Lake Superior, as early as 1795.

[7] They encountered Pierre Bonga and his family, whom Schoolcraft described as follows:Three miles above the mouth of the St. Louis River, there is a village of Chippeway Indians, of fourteen lodges, and containing a population of about sixty souls.

[20] Methodist missionary Alfred Brunson, who later became acquainted with the Falstroms in 1838, wrote in his memoirs that Jacob, "as all traders, deemed it necessary to form a connection with the Indians to sell their trade and protection by taking a 'wife of the daughters of the land.

[20][4] At least one historian has questioned whether this was actually the case, given the long and difficult journey Margaret would have had to make from the Fort Snelling area, where they were based in 1835 and 1837, or from Lakeland, where the Fahlstroms lived in 1844.

[7] Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, an estimated 15 to 30 enslaved African Americans lived and worked at Fort Snelling at any given time,[27] despite the fact that slavery was technically illegal in Minnesota country, according to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787[28] and the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

[1] Harriet married Dred Scott, an enslaved man working for the military surgeon at Fort Snelling, around 1837; the couple would later become well known for their unsuccessful bid for freedom via the United States Supreme Court.

[35] In June 1839, Agent Taliaferro sent Stephen Bonga to convey a message to Ojibwe Chief Hole-in-the-Day, asking him to stop 500 members of his tribe from coming en masse to the St. Peter's Agency.

[1] Upon his arrival on June 20, Hole-in-the-Day asked for permission to stay for three days, and held a council with Dakota leaders under a canopy outside the walls of Fort Snelling, with Stephen Bonga as the interpreter.

"[33] On June 24, a man named Libbey arrived by steamboat and sold 36 gallons of whiskey to Dakota interpreter Scott Campbell, resulting in "pandemonium.

[28] Officers at Fort Snelling complained of problems with drunkenness, resulting from the illicit sale of whiskey to soldiers, and the rapid depletion of timber and pasture nearby.

[36] Before the Treaty with the Sioux was concluded in September, a group of long-time residents of Camp Coldwater including Jacob Fahlstrom signed a formal petition sent to President Martin Van Buren on August 16, 1837, expressing concern about pending changes to their land use rights.

[30] In the spring of 1840, all civilians on the military reservation including Camp Coldwater were asked to leave, or forcibly evicted, by a deputy marshal sent from Prairie du Chien.

[21] Although his Methodist mission would be widely regarded as a failure, without a single convert among the Dakota,[35][38] Elder Brunson himself considered the conversion of the Fahlstrom family as his most significant achievement during these years.

[39] Their eldest daughter Nancy Fahlstrom was later remembered as "a woman of rare intellect and accomplishments" who served as an interpreter during services and meetings which the missionaries conducted with the Dakota at Red Rock prairie,[26] where a new church and school had opened after the Kaposia mission had closed.

[15] In 1840, Jacob was granted a license as an "exhorter" in the Methodist Church and began missionary work as the first lay preacher serving Big Sandy Lake and Fond du Lac.

[20][26][15] While living in Washington County, Margaret and the Fahlstrom children "kept open-house for weary – and hungry – circuit riders,"[2] the traveling clergymen of the Methodist Church.

Each spring, Margaret and her children were said to enjoy visiting maple-covered Manitou Island in the middle of White Bear Lake to make maple sugar.

[26][41] On May 11, 1864, Margaret Folstrom and her daughter Nancy were issued with "half-breed scrip" for 80 acres each from the United States Department of the Interior, as "mixed-bloods belonging to the Chippewa of Lake Superior, as provided for by treaty of 1854.

"[42] In 1863, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs had ruled that "mixed-blood" applicants would be eligible for the land grants regardless of whether or not they had actually resided with the Chippewa of Lake Superior at the time the treaty had been signed.

[45] Mattie Harper DeCarlo writes, "Without Margaret, it is unlikely that he would have secured the work or achieved the social positions that have drawn the attention of historians, scholars, and the general public.

"[45] DeCarlo argues that Margaret Bonga's story was marginalized due to "settler colonial narratives," which also served to "erase her as a woman of African ancestry.

"[28] Because of widespread intermarriage spanning over a century, racial identities in Minnesota country were defined based on cultural and lifestyle choices rather than skin color or blood quantum.

[28] She suggests that this was a "uniquely liberating" setting for people of African descent such as George Bonga, while acknowledging the irony of slavery tolerated by the United States government in Minnesota.

[28] In her 2012 Ph.D. thesis, Mattie Harper concludes that within the fur trade, George Bonga and his brothers were viewed as "half breeds" who were no different from their colleagues of mixed ancestry – usually with an Indian mother and a white or "mixed-blood" father of European descent.

"[15] In 1888, however, Neill mentioned Margaret's grandfather, Jean Bonga, as one of the "negroes taken prisoner in the Illinois country," in an article about the history of British rule in the region including Minnesota.

In Minnesota in Three Centuries (1908), historian Return Ira Holcombe referred to Margaret simply as "a half-blood Chippewa woman" who married Jacob Fahlstrom.

"[35] In Forever Beginning (1973), T. Otto Nall mentions Margaret Fahlstrom as part of a long tradition of women playing an important role in supporting the missionary work of the Methodist Church.

[2] Nall explains that the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, had appointed women to take an active role in leading classes, speaking about their Christian experiences, reading sermons, and giving short exhortations.

[26] In 1984, Emeroy Johnson questioned the accuracy of Grönberger's original account, commenting, "It is highly unlikely that a Negro woman was in northern Wisconsin and married to an Indian in the latter part of the 18th century.