Seneca Nation requests reversal on 'Lake America' executive order
The Hill · C · trust 43/100
Comments: by Sarah Davis - 08/29/26 7:59 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Sarah Davis - 08/29/26 7:59 AM ET Comments: Link copied NOW PLAYING Seneca Nation President J. Conrad Seneca called Friday for President Trump to rescind his order to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” citing a 225-year-old treaty between Native Americans and the U.S. government.
Seneca said in a statement that this name change, which President Trump authorized in a Thursday executive order , violated the terms of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua .
“The President cannot assert ownership over our culture or erase it through irresponsible political action,” he said in a statement.
President George Washington and leaders of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, which includes the Seneca Nation, signed the treaty to assert a shared commitment to peace. The document laid out the Seneca Nation’s boundaries as “beginning on Lake Ontario.”
Trump made the decision to change the lake’s name this week amid an escalating trade fight with Canada. Last year, the president also signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
“If you think about it, we have a gulf, now we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean,” Trump quipped to reporters in the Oval Office during Thursday’s signing ceremony. “Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), whose state borders the lake, said she would not honor the renaming request.
Additionally, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney noted the lake’s ties to Native American heritage in a statement condemning its renaming on Thursday.
“The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big,’” Carney wrote on the social platform X .
The leader added that “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.”
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