Marguerite “Mnetoqua” Nashcah

Biography

Mnetoqua remained near the graves of her ancestors during the removal era. Forest Park’s historical society remembers her as a Potawatomi woman who stayed to care for those burial places, on land now within Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, just west of Chicago, Illinois. It also records the names Marguerite and Margaret.

She was married to Leon Bourassa. The society’s cemetery history describes the couple caring for the burial sites on property acquired in 1839 and sold in 1851. Their home stood within a landscape already used by Indigenous people for settlement and burial, long before it became a suburban cemetery.

A memorial erected in 1941 places her decision at the center of its account: Margaret had grown up in the grove and chose to stay near the ancestral graves after her people were forced away. That is a later community remembrance, rather than her own recorded words, but it preserves a specific action and a place with which her life remained associated.