Overview:
Publisher Levi Rickert (Potawatomi) argues that protecting the Great Lakes means defending them from the risks posed by Line 5 and preserving their Indigenous names.
Opinion
Living in the Great Lakes region, about 30 miles from Lake Michigan, which the Anishinaabe still call Mishigami, I am partial to the Great Lakes. They contain 20% of Mother Earth’s surface freshwater.
I remember in early 1998, when then-Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy inserted a sentence into legislation reauthorizing the National Sea Grant Program: “The term ‘Great Lakes’ includes Lake Champlain.” The lake borders Vermont and New York. President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law. Defenders of the Great Lakes erupted in protest. The pushback was so great that 18 days later, Congress removed Lake Champlain from the list of Great Lakes.
On Wednesday, Native News Online covered a rally on the steps of the Michigan State Capitol, where about 150 Michigan tribal leaders, environmentalists and allies rallied against the aging Enbridge Line 5. It was a rally to protect the Great Lakes’ fresh water from the potential for catastrophic ecological damage that could occur if Line 5 bursts.
That was Wednesday. A day later, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Honoring the American History of the Great Lakes and Renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America.” In the order, Trump directs the Interior secretary to work with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to “take all appropriate actions to rename as ‘Lake America’ the body of water currently named as Lake Ontario, bounded on the south and east by the State of New York, and on the north, west, and southwest by the Canadian province of Ontario.”
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario quickly drew resistance from Indian Country. Seneca Nation President J. Conrad Seneca called for Trump to rescind the executive order, saying the renaming violates the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, signed by the first president of the United States, George Washington. The treaty established the Seneca Nation’s boundaries as “beginning on Lake Ontario.”
The lake’s name comes from the Huron Indigenous people’s word “oniatarí:io” which means “lake of shining waters.” In the traditional Seneca language, it is called “sga:nyodai:yoh” meaning “beautiful lake,” according to Seneca.
In a lengthy statement, Seneca called Trump’s executive order “starkly un-presidential” and said Trump showed Seneca people “blatant disrespect.” Seneca also said Trump “cannot assert ownership over our culture or erase it.”
In Canada, Wendat Nation Grand Chief Pierre Picard told the press he was “outraged, appalled, shocked” by Trump’s renaming and called it an attempt to eradicate Wendat history. Picard described the name change as “a direct blow to the very heart of our Wendat identity.”
Wyandotte Nation Chairman Billy Friend, who leads a nation that originated in the Georgian Bay region of present-day Canada and now calls Oklahoma home, called the renaming “a slap in the face.” The issue is not political to him; instead, it is about history and respect for a name with Native American origins. He said tribal nations of the region should have been consulted prior to the executive order.
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario was political. The self-described dealmaker failed to make a trade deal with Canada. He retaliated by turning an Indigenous name into a political weapon.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was not deterred. He noted in a statement the Native American heritage.
“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 media platform X.
Carney added that “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.”
Since taking office for his second term, President Donald Trump has signed a whopping 277 executive orders. That is more than President Barack Obama signed during his two terms as president.
Executive orders are written directives signed by the president that tell federal government agencies how to manage their operations in implementing the president’s wishes.
Every U.S. president since George Washington has issued executive orders. Washington issued eight during his nearly eight years in office. Three presidents — John Adams, James Madison and James Monroe — issued only one executive order apiece during their respective presidencies.
In December 2025, the States United Democracy Center released a report that analyzed Trump’s first 217 executive orders during his first 10 months in office of his second term. The analysis showed that Trump’s executive orders are unprecedented in scale, have been met with strong judicial and state pushback, and often clash with public sentiment.
Like many Americans, I wish President Trump would spend less time renaming bodies of water and more time addressing the high cost of living.
Trump and his billionaire friends live in a bubble and appear to not care about the things important to average, hard-working Americans who have a hard time filling up their gasoline tanks so they can get to work.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Trump signed an executive order to bring down the cost of gasoline to levels they were at prior to his Iran War?
And the president should take heed of Native people who want to preserve the Great Lakes for generations to come — both keeping them clean from oil and protecting their names from tampering.
Thayék gde nwéndëmen – We are all related.
