Lake Ontario to Lake America – who gets to decide what goes on maps?

Filed 1h ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

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Mister Exposition

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: David Smith · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

President Trump issued an executive order renaming Lake Ontario 'Lake America,' claiming his administration had 'notified all of the various people you have to notify' — a process the piece notes normally starts locally, with state and county approval before the U.S. Board on Geographic Names makes it official. Ontario's premier had previously dismissed the idea as rhetoric.

The article traces the actual renaming precedent: Minnesota's decade-long, multi-agency process to rename a lake Bde Maka Ska, and the 40-year fight to restore Denali's name over objections from Ohio's congressional delegation. Trump has already renamed the Gulf of Mexico 'Gulf of America' and reverted Denali to Mount McKinley by executive order.

The piece notes a wrinkle: the Gulf lies mostly in international waters, so no U.S. board can force other countries to rename anything, and mapping companies like Google now simply display different names depending on which country you're viewing from.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

There is a whole formal apparatus — state agencies, tribal consultation, decades of paperwork — built specifically so place names don't get changed on a presidential whim, and the response to that apparatus has been to whim right past it anyway. Renaming a lake by decree and calling the notifications done is not geography, it's branding, and Google's country-by-country map settings are already quietly proving the decree doesn't travel.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: Mister Exposition · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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