Seneca Nation asks Trump to drop the Lake America order
J. Conrad Seneca says the 27 August order renaming Lake Ontario for U.S. maps violates the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua and ignores a name older than both countries. Interior has 30 days to update GNIS. About 47 percent of the lake's surface sits on the American side.
Salamanca, New York3 min read
Last updated
Seneca Nation President J. Conrad Seneca called on Friday for President Donald Trump to rescind the executive order that renames Lake Ontario as Lake America in U.S. federal records. He said the order showed blatant disrespect for the Seneca people, other Haudenosaunee nations and the Indigenous communities that have lived around the lake longer than either the United States or Canada has existed.
Trump signed the order on Thursday, 27 August. It directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, working with the Board on Geographic Names, to change the name in the Geographic Names Information System within 30 days. From that point, federal agencies are to use Lake America when they refer to the body of water bounded on the south and east by New York and on the north, west and southwest by the Canadian province of Ontario.
The order applies only to the U.S. government. Canada has not been asked to change its maps. Ontario's provincial government and Ottawa still call the lake by its existing name. Roughly 47 percent of the surface area lies on the American side. The White House text claims that the deepest parts sit in U.S. territory and that the United States therefore holds most of the lake's volume.
Trump framed the change as part of a trade fight. After talks with Canada broke down, he said on social media that Washington did not expect to do much business with Ontario any longer. He posted a marked-up map and a video of himself striking out Ontario and writing Lake America. In the Oval Office he said the papers had been filed and that the change was official at once, even though the order itself gives Interior a month to update the database.
The 27 August text cites Executive Order 14172 of 20 January 2025, Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness. That earlier order is the same instrument used to restore the name Mount McKinley to the Alaska peak that federal maps had carried as Denali.
Conrad Seneca pointed to the Treaty of Canandaigua, signed in 1794 by President George Washington and the Haudenosaunee confederacy. The treaty promised perpetual peace and friendship. He said a president cannot assert ownership over Seneca culture or erase it through a naming stunt. In the Seneca language the lake is sga:nyodai:yoh, often rendered as beautiful lake. The English name Ontario is itself drawn from an Iroquoian root. Conrad told local television that people in the region would keep saying Lake Ontario and asked others to do the same.
A White House spokesperson told Buffalo station WIVB that most of the lake's volume sits in U.S. territory and that the new name would reflect its place in American heritage. Canadian officials have treated the move as political theatre tied to the collapsed trade round rather than as a hydrographic fact.
Lake Ontario is the easternmost and smallest of the five Great Lakes by surface area. It drains through the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic. Buffalo, Rochester and Toronto sit on its shores. Shipping, hydropower, municipal water and cross-border sport fisheries all depend on a shared legal regime that has nothing to do with the name printed on a U.S. federal layer.
The Board on Geographic Names can record a federal name without forcing states, counties, nautical charts issued with Canadian partners, or school atlases to follow. New York agencies have not said they will reprint highway signs. The Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will have to decide how they label charts that ships on both sides of the border use.
The information gain in the fight is legal, not cartographic. The Canandaigua treaty is still in force. It does not contain a clause that freezes English place names. What it does contain is a promise of peace and a recognition of Haudenosaunee presence. Seneca's objection is that the order treats that presence as optional decoration on a map the president can edit in a trade dispute.
Thirty days is a short clock. If Interior writes Lake America into GNIS, every later federal environmental impact statement, dredging permit and Great Lakes compact filing that crosses a U.S. desk will carry the new label. The lake itself will not move. The name on the Canadian shore will not change. The argument that remains is whether a 400-year-old word, and a 232-year-old treaty, can be overwritten by an order signed for a week of leverage against Ottawa.
