What’s in a name? Trump’s ‘Lake America’ threat raises questions about centuries of history

U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” but the name has centuries of history behind it.

Trump said Tuesday the United States is giving “serious consideration” to changing the name of Lake Ontario as relations with Canada, and particularly Ontario, sour amid an escalating trade dispute.

He later posted a graphic depicting the Great Lake under the proposed “Lake America” name.

The threat came a day after Trump and Ontario Premier Doug Ford publicly traded insults as tensions over the Canada-U.S. trade dispute escalated.

Ford dismissed the proposed name change during an interview with CNN on Tuesday. “I think it’s a lot of rhetoric,” Ford told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

For Mary Baxter, a PhD candidate in Western University’s history department who specializes in Great Lakes environmental history, the threat immediately brought to mind the Republican president’s executive order last year to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

“My first reaction was to think of the whole Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America incident,” Baxter told Global News.

“There are times when we’ve heard Trump back down, but there are also times where he moved ahead with things. And this is one of those things that he could move ahead on,” she said.

Trump signed an executive order last year directing the U.S. government to use the name Gulf of America. But Lake Ontario’s name has a much longer history than either Canada or the United States.

Baxter said the name Ontario comes from an Iroquoian language term and roughly translates to “sparkling waters.”

The lake has been known by several names over its history, including different names used by First Nations before European exploration.

Baxter said French explorers also used different names for the lake, while the French and British had competing names for it during their conflicts in North America.

The French often referred to it as Lac Frontenac, she said, while the British at times used Cataraqui Lake, another name with Iroquoian origins.

By the mid-1700s — before the American Revolution and the eventual creation of Canada and the United States — Lake Ontario had emerged as the name that stuck.