Canadian musician Bryan Adams has released a pointed new song challenging Donald Trump’s executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” describing the directive as an erasure of Indigenous history and an unnecessary provocation against a long-standing ally. The track forms part of a forthcoming album that Adams has characterised as a “love letter” to Canada, arriving at a moment when relations between Ottawa and Washington remain under strain. For Adams, the issue is not merely cartographic; it is about who gets to decide what a place is called.
A lake renamed by executive order
In August, the US president signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to rechristen Lake Ontario as Lake America. The move echoed his earlier, widely mocked decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.” Critics in Canada have noted the historical irony: the province of Ontario is named after the lake, not the other way around. Adams’s lyrics answer the order directly by restoring the original name used by the Iroquois. “The ‘lake of shining waters’ is what the Iroquois called her,” he sings. “It’s a First Nations name – not an executive order.”
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