What Is in a Name? Ontario

MIP Author

Aug 28

6 min read

Updated: 15 minutes ago

Le lac Ontario avec les lieux circonvoisins et particulièrement les cinq nations iroquoises
Pierre Raffeix, a French Jesuit
Date: 1688
Original format: Manuscript map, approximately 50 × 38 centimetres
Repository: Bibliothèque nationale de France — Lake Ontario with the surrounding places and particularly the Five Iroquois Nations” Pierre Raffeix, 1688

On August 27, 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing United States federal agencies to call Lake Ontario “Lake America.” An executive order can change the wording used by federal agencies and maps. It cannot change the history of the lake or the origin of its name.

Ontario is not a modern Canadian invention. It is a Native name, rooted in the Indigenous languages and cultures of the Great Lakes. Europeans were recording versions of the name by 1641, more than a century before the United States declared independence and more than two centuries before Canadian Confederation. Understanding that history begins with the water itself.

A government may direct its agencies to print a different label. It cannot make the 1641 record disappear. It cannot separate the lake from the Native languages that named it, nor can it erase the nations whose relationships with these waters continue.

Ontario, A Lake Formed by Ice

Lake Ontario is the easternmost of the five Great Lakes. Its basin was shaped by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of northern North America during the last Ice Age.

As the ice retreated, meltwater filled deep depressions carved and reshaped by glaciers. The Great Lakes did not appear all at once in their present form. Their shorelines, depths and outlets changed as the ice withdrew and the land slowly rebounded from the tremendous weight of the glaciers.

Lake Ontario became the final lake in a vast connected system. Water travels from Lake Superior through Lakes Michigan and Huron, Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. It then passes through the Niagara River and Niagara Falls into Lake Ontario before continuing through the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean.

This geography made the lake part of an ancient transportation and trading network. Long before international borders divided the region, Native nations travelled its waters, lived along its shores and understood its place within the larger system of rivers and lakes.

Ontario Is a Native Name

Let's explain: long before modern borders divided these waters, Indigenous peoples knew and named the Great Lakes in their own languages. There was never one universal Indigenous naming system for all five lakes. Names differed among Nations, languages, communities and periods. The precise spelling and translation vary because Europeans attempted to write Indigenous words using French and English spelling conventions. Indigenous languages also changed across communities, dialects and generations.

The name is commonly connected to the Wendat, also known as the Huron-Wyandot, word Ontarí:io (or Ontare). It has been translated as “great lake” or “beautiful lake.” Other explanations connect it with related Iroquoian words such as kanadario or skanadario, translated as “sparkling water” or “beautiful water.”

These interpretations are not identical, but they agree on the most important point: Ontario is an Indigenous name from the Iroquoian language world. The name was not created by the Province of Ontario. The province inherited its name from the lake when it entered Canadian Confederation in 1867. The lake had carried a Native-derived name for centuries before the modern province existed.

Respectfully, we can speak these names. Just as importantly, we can identify the Nation and language connected with each one and acknowledge where the surviving historical record remains uncertain. More names and explanations:

Archival title: Carte de l’Amérique septentrionale et partie de la méridionale depuis l’embouchure de la rivière St Laurens jusqu’à l’isle de Cayenne avec les nouvelles découvertes de la rivière de Mississipi ou Colbert
Cartographer: Attributed to Claude Bernou
Date: Approximately 1680–1681
Geographical scope: North America from the St. Lawrence to Cayenne, including the Great Lakes and Mississippi
Historical basis: Incorporates information from the 1673 journeys of Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette and later French expeditions — 1673 journeys of Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette and later French expeditions, approximately 1680–1681, Map Attributed to Claude Bernou

Recorded in 1641, Not Created in 1641

One of the earliest surviving European documents to use the name is the Jesuit Relation for 1640 and 1641. The report was written by the French Jesuit missionary Jérôme Lalemant at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons and dated May 19, 1641. While describing the Great Lakes and the Niagara River, which the document rendered as “Onguiaahra,” Lalemant wrote that the river emptied “into the Ontario or lake of saint Louys.”

This sentence is important because it shows that Europeans were already using “Ontario” as the name of the lake in 1641. The document did not invent the name. It recorded a name that Europeans encountered in an Indigenous world.

The Jesuit Relations must also be read critically. They were colonial missionary reports written from European religious and political perspectives. Their descriptions of Native peoples frequently reflected the assumptions and prejudices of their authors. Nevertheless, the appearance of “Ontario” in the record preserves evidence that the Native name was already in circulation. The surviving document therefore marks an early European recording of the name, not its Indigenous beginning.

A Name That Survived Colonial Renaming

French colonists also applied European names to the lake. During the seventeenth century it was sometimes called Lac Saint-Louis, or Lake St. Louis. It was later called Lac Frontenac in honour of Louis de Buade de Frontenac, governor general of New France.

Those colonial names did not endure.

A 1660 map by François Du Creux identified the lake in Latin as Lacus Ontarius. Another French map from the period called it Lac Ontario ou des Iroquois, meaning “Lake Ontario or Lake of the Iroquois.”

These maps show European cartographers gradually incorporating an Indigenous name into their own geographical records. Spellings changed, and competing colonial names appeared, but Ontario survived.

That survival matters. Indigenous place names are often among the oldest historical records still spoken in everyday life. They carry evidence of languages, relationships and systems of knowledge that existed before colonial borders and governments.

Hand-colored 1688 French map of the Great Lakes, with Lake Ontario labeled “Lac Frontenac, ou Ontario, et Skaniadorio, ou S. Louis.” — Vincenzo Maria Coronelli’s 1688 map labels the lake “Lac Frontenac, ou Ontario, et Skaniadorio, ou S. Louis,” placing the Indigenous-derived names Ontario and Skaniadorio alongside competing French colonial names. The map documents Ontario’s appearance in European cartography nearly two centuries before Canadian Confederation. Published in Paris by Jean-Baptiste Nolin. Courtesy of the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries.

Whose Homelands?

The lands surrounding Lake Ontario cannot be reduced to the history of a single people or a single moment. They form part of the homelands, travel routes and treaty territories of several Native nations.

The Indigenous history of the region includes the Huron-Wendat, the Haudenosaunee, the people whom the Wendat called the Attiwandaronk and the French called the Neutral Nation, and Anishinaabe peoples, including the Mississaugas.

Communities moved, formed alliances, fought wars, negotiated treaties and responded to epidemics and colonial expansion. Their histories overlap without becoming interchangeable.

For that reason, the question should not only be, “Whose lands were these?” That wording can place Native peoples entirely in the past. A more honest question is, “Whose homelands do these remain?”

The nations connected to Lake Ontario are not vanished peoples. Their communities, governments, languages and relationships with the water continue.

Distribution of Northeast American peoples, Publisher Encyclopædia Britannica — **Distribution of Northeast American peoples**

Why the Name Matters

The Museum of Indigenous People exists “to instill understanding and respect for the Indigenous cultures of the Southwest.” Although Lake Ontario lies outside the Southwest, the principle of integrity remains the same: Native histories should be represented accurately, and Indigenous people should not be treated as if they belong only to the past.

Ontario is not simply a Canadian political label. It is a surviving Native name.

Replacing it with “Lake America” does more than substitute one set of words for another. It removes an Indigenous-derived name and replaces it with the language of a modern nation-state. It places a contemporary political identity over a much older cultural and geographical history.

A government may direct its agencies to print a different label. It cannot make the 1641 record disappear. It cannot separate the lake from the Native languages that named it, nor can it erase the nations whose relationships with these waters continue.

Ontario remains more than a word on a map. It is an Indigenous name carried across centuries, one that describes the water while preserving a trace of the people who knew it long before either Canada or the United States existed.