Despite Canada’s long history of Indigenous cultural and linguistic suppression, there are still places where key geographic areas use Indigenous words.
Lake Ontario is one of them.
The lake borders both the United States and Canada, yet its name belongs to neither country.
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 27, stating that he “filed all necessary papers” to rename the lake “Lake America.”
The announcement comes during ongoing U.S.-Canada tension, but its significance extends beyond the two countries’ economic relationship.
It may have been done out of spite or to troll Canadians, but Trump does not have the power to change Lake Ontario’s name. The name, from Kaniatarí:io or Oniatarí:io, means “lake of shining waters” or “beautiful lake."
The name Lake Ontario carries the cultural and linguistic history attached to the lake, whether people recognize it or not. The lake’s name was officially used in the 1794 signing of the Treaty of Canandaigua, a deal between the U.S. and the Seneca Nation.
Trump’s move is just another ploy by a government to remove the history of Indigenous people.
The Canadian government is not innocent in the history of Indigenous cultural suppression.
Residential schools and assimilation policies are known to have caused enormous erasure of Indigenous languages and cultures.
That makes the survival of Indigenous-derived place names all the more significant.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a post on X that the lake’s name comes from the Wendat language.
The United States has long been described as a melting pot of cultures and identities. But Trump’s recent actions suggest the melting-pot ideal can also become a form of suppression of culture and language.
He is turning the ideology into something else: a way of "melting" America’s diversity into a single national identity.
A country cannot claim that it celebrates diversity while continually placing one dominant national identity above the culture within it. Trump’s renaming of the lake places American identity above the Indigenous and the shared Canadian-American history attached to the lake.
This is not the first time Trump changed the name of a body of water.
Trump signed an order in 2025 changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, placing U.S. identity directly in the name of a shared body of water. The world, however, doesn’t recognize the renaming.
Trump reinforces an America-centred worldview by changing the names of these bodies of water.
His decisions reflect a narrow conception of the world in which American identity is considered the default centre of political and cultural life.
American political power does not give it ownership over a lake whose history predates the country’s independence.
Carney said Canadians will keep calling it Lake Ontario, regardless of what name Trump decides to use. Trump can change what appears on a U.S. map, but he cannot rewrite the lake's history or alter its identity.
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