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There is something almost absurd about opening Google Maps in Toronto, seeing Lake Ontario, then opening the same map in New York and seeing Lake America.
The lake has not changed. Its history has not changed. The border has not changed. What has changed is the name displayed on your screen.
President Trump signed an executive order on August 27 directing the U.S. federal government to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” The change was added to the U.S. Geographic Names Information System, which Google uses as one of its official naming sources. The result is a strange piece of digital geography. Americans see Lake America. Canadians continue to see Lake Ontario. Users elsewhere may see both names.
There is some irony in replacing a name with deep Indigenous roots with “Lake America.” The word Ontario itself comes from an Iroquoian word, kanadario, meaning “sparkling water.” The Seneca Nation, which opposed the change, says its traditional Seneca name for the lake is sga:nyodai:yoh, meaning “beautiful lake.”
And a U.S. presidential order does not, of course, rename the lake for everyone else. Canada has not adopted the change. Oswego County in New York is continuing to use Lake Ontario, citing its historical significance and the cost of changing tourism and business materials. Even the federally designated Lake Ontario National Marine Sanctuary is keeping its existing name while the federal agency managing it refers to the surrounding water as Lake America.
MapQuest went one step further and refused to change the name. According to the article, that decision helped propel the app to number one on Apple’s U.S. App Store, with more than 1.5 million installs across the U.S. and Canada.
Which brings us to perhaps the strangest part of this story. A lake that has existed for thousands of years now has a different name depending on your IP address. Governments can change databases. Platforms can change labels. But changing what millions of people call a place is another matter entirely.
For me Lake Ontario is still Lake Ontario in Ontario. Which feels like a sentence nobody should ever have needed to write. It is why I bought this domain.
Sources of information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Ontario
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/ce3ryr3enrpo
Lake Ontario will always be Lake Ontario
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