Considering all that’s going on around here – the relentless, undeclared war of an imperial presidency, spiteful attacks on the freedom of the press, unlawful withholding of Congressional funds, presidential profiteering, blatant efforts to rig the upcoming elections, skyrocketing prices, and so on – one might wonder why I’ve made the executive order that changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” the topic of my Mabon blog.
Short answer: because it bugs the hell out of me.
I’ve heard some smart pundits say they’d rather Donnie Demento focus on turning the architectural wonders of Washington, D.C. into kitsch than on rigging the mid-terms. Rather he fall asleep in meetings than try to run them. Rather he re-name a few landmarks than send invasive forces to foreign lands.
I get it. I see their point.
But this guy’s name obsession is next-level. He’s incredibly insecure, grew up unloved and neglected, never got his psyche past, maybe, 11 years old. He plays the schoolyard bully, because to his puerile eye, bullying looks like power and control. And nothing – I mean nothing – gets him off like seeing his name on a big, phallic building.
So when his popularity poll numbers are tanking, when he’s losing his war, losing his base, he grumbles, “What will it take to get these nasty people to like me again?” Naturally, being a narcissist, he can only think of what would get him to like someone he didn’t much like. Easy. He’d like them plenty if they’d put his name on a big, phallic building.
Well, the American people don’t have “a” name. We’re a nameless mass of insignificance with a few attractive ass-lickers here and there and a bunch of standout boobs.
But wait! The American people are AMERICANS! Bingo!! All he’s gotta do is stick “America” onto something really big, and everybody will say he’s the greatest! If it takes more than that, he’s got a state with an un-American name and a pair of unclaimed oceans standing by, awaiting executive orders.
When American schoolchildren are shown a map of the United States, they see only the part of the Gulf of Mexico that touches our borders. They never learn that Mexico has as much gulf coastline as we do. Which is why my very sweet neighbor who has always lived by Lake Ontario says renaming it “Lake America” is awful, but understands the “Gulf of America” thing.
Citations for the maps above: Nick Roux, Peter Fitzgerald, User:Cacahuate, User:LtPowers, Joelf, Sumone10154, User:Texugo, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons and Wikideas1, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Mexico_map.svg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=index&utm_content=original
Just prior to issuing his “Gulf of America” executive order, DJT was engaged in a very public, very rancorous dispute with Mexico regarding immigration, drug cartels, and trade. Same pattern with “Lake America.” He did what he did when he did (27 August 2026) because he was pissed off at Canada that day.
Trade talks between the U.S. and our good neighbor to the north had broken down earlier in the week. Reacting like the true idiot he is, our spoiled brat of a president vented his embarrassment and frustration by levying new 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods. Ignorant of or indifferent to how his tariffs harm our county, he chanted “neener-neener” for a hot minute, then Canada imposed counter-tariffs to the tune of (you guessed it) $20 billion.
Dull as a doughnut and, odds are, laboring under the delusion that Canadians somehow called “dibs” on the lake, then christened it after the province that borders it (as he would have done), Imperator Comicus Americanus (our Comic-in-Chief) issued Executive Order 14422, officially turning Lake Ontario into “Lake America” for all federal purposes.
That was as far as the name change had to go. No other nation is under any obligation to use the appellation “Lake America”, nor need any non-federal business or agency adopt it. And yet, Google Maps, Apple Maps, and AccuWeather hastily bent the knee and acquiesced to our petty POTUS’s revenge rebranding. Now the National Weather Service is capitulating, whilst the AP is straddling the fence by plastering an excessively long “Lake Ontario/Lake America” label across the smallest of the five Great Lakes.
I’d be ticked off about this no matter where I lived, but now that I live 0.78 mi/1.26 km from the edge of the standing body of water in question, this latest example of bureaucratic toponymic erasure has me well and truly riled.
“Toponymic erasure” is more than mouthful. It’s a vicious act of colonial dominance.
Part I of toponymic erasure is linguistic overwriting: replacing Indigenous place-names with colonizer-preferred ones. The Onödowa’ga:’ (traditional stewards of the ancestral and unceded homelands where I now reside), call the lake Sga:nyodai:yoh’. (DISCLAIMER: the pronunciation guide at the bottom of this post will barely get you to first base in the Correct Pronunciation ballpark.) The Wendat (traditional stewards of the lake’s north shore and much more besides), call it Oniatarí:io. While these two nations def had their differences once upon a time, they were in total agreement about the name of the waters that lay between them. Both Sga:nyodai:yoh’ and Oniatarí:io mean “Great/Beautiful Lake.”
Despite what you may have heard, neither translates to “Lake of the Shining Waters.” In addition to stealing the lake, European colonizers augmented the meaning of its name to conform to the romantic aesthetic of their “noble savage” imperialistic nostalgia. “Great/Beautiful Lake” is a geographic designation reflecting the lake’s scale and importance. Tweaking it to “shining waters” is semantic appropriation; stripping a word of its authentic historical context. To tout “Lake of the Shining Waters” as a legit translation of the Indigenous name obscures linguistic authenticity, severs the visceral connection between a people and their geographical home, excises tribal authority from history, and grafts a colonial fantasy onto the record in its place.
Linguistic overwriting leads to psychological dislocation. Expunging the words that express a people’s intimate, ancestral relationship to the land shatters that relationship, leaving the people adrift. Adrift mentally and emotionally, absolutely, but surely this diaspora is profoundly spiritual as well, a loss of personal and communal identity.
The final phase of toponymic erasure is cartographic violence. Official maps are drawn up. Referencing those maps, the reigning imperial power declares the new name the true name, thereby removing the original place-name from existence and rendering those who so named it invisible to the rest of the world.
It was small consolation, but at least “Lake Ontario” bore some resemblance to the Wendat name. Changing it to “Lake America” on the maps compounds the violence. It’s erasure upon erasure upon erasure.
The Onödowa’ga:’ – “People of the Great Hill” – became the Seneca due to ethnonymic erasure (the replacement of a group’s self-chosen name with a name chosen by outsiders). The Wendat – “Peninsula Dwellers” – were scattered by military displacement actions and forced removal policies, some ending up in Oklahoma (the Wyandotte Nation), others in Québec (the Huron-Wendat Nation). The latter is endeavoring to officially drop the “Huron” part of its title; it’s a derogatory slur imposed on them by the French.
Digression Time: I take devilish pleasure in the fact that colonizers later bestowed the name “Huron” on another of the Great Lakes (the one that surrounds the Wendat’s peninsula), essentially laying claim to the territory they stole with an ethnonymic insult.
Short answer about how this post came to be is tots honest, and I’m sticking to it. Long answer is that Mabon, the heart of the harvest season, is my personal Thanksgiving holiday. Back home in California, the countless “tells” of autumn always woke a slumbering part of me from its summer hibernation and filled me with excitement. The angle of the sun’s rays, poison oak’s russet warning, vineyards in full crush, the native fuchsia blooming …
Here at home in Western New York, autumn brooks no subtle tells. Suddenly and all at once the seasons change. Corn cedes to apples. Birds flee for warmer climes. Chipmunks reappear and forage madly. Velvet-racked stags force drivers to slow. Leaves fall, ferns die, acorns carpet the forest floor. By the shores of Sga:nyodai:yoh’, joy wakes in me at the crack of thunder and sings in the storm. Joy and gratitude …
… and sorrow and shame. Sorrow, because I live on the edge of a diminishing wild that was never ours to ruin and someone else’s to love and protect. Shame, because I owe my good fortune to heinous acts of theft and imperialism.
With a few jagged, unreadable strokes of an autopen, a spiteful simp in a remodeled White House simultaneously escalated a self-harming trade war with Canada and erased an already-blurred, barely-legible legacy of Indigenous sovereignty and regional identity in Western New York State.
I find it comforting that despite the cartographic violence, the old songs are still sung. May you find it comforting as well, and may all the blessings of the season be yours.
PRONUNCIATION GUIDE:
- Onödowa’ga:’ (oh-nyown-doh-WAH-(glottal stop)-gaaah-(glottal stop))
- Sga:nyodai:yoh’ (sgaaah-nyo-DAAAI-yoh-(glottal stop))
- Oniatarí:io (own-yah-dah-REEE-yoh-(very brief glottal stop))
A perfect Mabon Blessing.