By Nicole Rosen, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Language Interactions, University of Manitoba The ongoing economic spat between Canada and the United States took a strange turn after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order “renaming” Lake Ontario as Lake America. The lake is the second body of water to be renamed by Trump. In January 2025, he similarly ordered that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America. That same order also officially changed Alaska’s Mount Denali to its colonial name, Mount McKinley. While many might view Trump’s renamings as comical or unserious, for Indigenous communities, they are reminiscent of centuries of settler-colonial erasure. What’s in a place name? The name Ontario can be traced to the Huron word ontarí:io, a Wyandot (Huron) word meaning…
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