Seneca Nation tells Trump to drop the Lake America order

J. Conrad Seneca, president of the Seneca Nation, called on Friday for President Donald Trump to rescind an executive order that renames Lake Ontario as Lake America. "The president cannot assert ownership over our culture or erase it through irresponsible political action," he said. He asked that the lake keep the name that reflects the Seneca, other Haudenosaunee nations and the Indigenous people who have lived around it.

Trump signed the order on Thursday, 27 August, in the Oval Office and said it was effective immediately. The text directs the interior secretary, working with the Board on Geographic Names, to update the Geographic Names Information System within 30 days. The lake is bounded on the south and east by New York and on the north, west and southwest by the Canadian province of Ontario.

The name Ontario comes from a Huron word, often rendered as oniatarí:io, "lake of shining waters." The Seneca term is sga:nyodai:yoh, "beautiful lake." The Canadian province took the name in 1867. Jérôme Marty, executive director of the International Association for Great Lakes Research, noted that Indigenous people named the water long before either modern state existed.

A treaty from 1794

Seneca said the order violates the Treaty of Canandaigua, signed in 1794 by President George Washington and the Haudenosaunee confederacy. That treaty promised perpetual peace and friendship and recognised Haudenosaunee lands in what is now New York. A renaming inside a federal database is not a land seizure. Seneca's point is that the United States is treating a shared Indigenous place-name as a chip in a trade fight.

Trump tied the order to Canada. After the signing he said Canada "treats us very badly" on trade, called it the "worst" counterpart, and repeated a threat of steep tariffs on Canadian-made cars. He said the United States "defend[s] Canada for nothing." A White House spokesperson later told WIVB that most of the lake's volume sits in U.S. territory, repeating a claim in the order itself.

Volume is not sovereignty over a name used on both shores. Canada has not said it will print "Lake America" on its charts. Conrad Seneca told WGRZ that people in the region will keep saying Lake Ontario and that others should do the same.

What the order can and cannot do

The Board on Geographic Names can change the federal label. Highway signs, school textbooks, shipping charts and Canadian maps do not flip on the same day. Executive Order 14172 of 20 January 2025 had already set a policy of renaming landmarks to "honor American greatness." Lake America is that policy applied to a lake that two countries and several nations already named.

Interior has 30 days on the clock. Seneca has asked for a rescission. The treaty argument will not be decided by a press statement. The immediate fact is narrower: as of Friday the federal government has been told to write a new name into GNIS, and the people who gave the old name have told it not to.