There is something quietly poignant about watching a nation realize, perhaps for the very first time, that its geography is not an absolute shield against imperial vanity. This week, the soundtrack to that sudden awakening arrived via six strings and the raspy indignation of Bryan Adams. The veteran Canadian rocker released an ode to Lake Ontario, vowing that the vast freshwater sea dividing his homeland from the United States will never be renamed Lake America by Donald Trump. Adams lamented a broken peace, reaching back through centuries to invoke Skaniadorio, the Haudenosaunee name for those shining waters, to remind his listeners that the lake has a history older and deeper than modern border squabbles.
It is easy to smile at the pop-cultural spectacle of an aging rock star standing on the northern shore of a Great Lake, shaking his guitar at the White House. But for those of us watching from Accra, from Bogotá, or from Jakarta, the underlying anxiety is painfully recognizable. To live alongside an empire is to live with the perpetual knowledge that your sovereignty is, in the eyes of Washington, often treated as a polite administrative fiction. For more than two centuries, the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean have known the bitter truth of the Monroe Doctrine: that whenever the hegemon casts its eyes across a river or a bay, it sees not a neighbor’s home, but a resource waiting to be enclosed.
Canada has long enjoyed an exceptional buffer. Wrapped in the warm blanket of shared alliances, shared racial compositions in the halls of power, and mutual corporate interests, Ottawa could comfortably view itself as an equal partner rather than a subordinate territory. Yet when an aggressive, transactional politics grips Washington, even the gentlest border suddenly feels cold. The rhetoric of dominance does not stop at the forty-ninth parallel simply out of courtesy. When an American president speaks of neighboring lands and shared waters as prizes to be dominated, he is not inventing a new posture; he is merely pointing the old imperial compass north instead of south.
There is, of course, an unavoidable irony in Adams invoking the Indigenous name of the lake to defend Canadian state sovereignty. It is a familiar reflex across the Americas: settler states often discover their deep reverence for Indigenous stewardship precisely when an even larger power threatens to swallow their perimeter. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose territory spans both sides of that deep blue boundary, did not draw the line that divides Lake Ontario down the middle. For centuries, their elders have warned that treating the water as property—whether stamped with the maple leaf or the stars and stripes—is the root of its degradation. Long before Donald Trump cast an acquisitive glance across the water, industrial runoff, corporate shipping, and state neglect had already broken the peace of Skaniadorio.
This is the lesson that communities from the Mekong Delta to the Niger River have been trying to teach the world for generations. Borders drawn by treaties and defended by pop songs are fragile constructs. When powerful men fight over who owns the water, it is almost never about protecting the fragile ecology or honoring the communities that live on its banks. It is about control, extraction, and leverage. The fishermen who mend their nets on the shores of Lake Victoria or along the Rio Grande understand this intuitively. They know that when capitals posture and issue threats, the working people on the ground are merely expected to serve as the scenery for the drama.
If Canada is now beginning to feel the uneasy chill of imperial proximity, we should welcome its people to the conversation with open arms and patient solidarity. The anxiety of being erased, of having your lakes, your timber, or your labor treated as collateral in someone else’s domestic campaign, is the defining condition of the Global South. It is the history of the banana republics, the debt-trapped archipelagos, and the partitioned valleys of Africa.
Bryan Adams sings that the peace has been broken, but true peace was never merely the quiet agreement between two wealthy nations to share a coastline. True peace requires an understanding that natural wonders do not belong to the empires that border them, nor even to the flags that claim their northern banks. If Lake Ontario is to remain free from the grasp of a rapacious neighbor, it will not be saved by national pride alone, but by learning the hard-won humility of the nations that have survived empire for centuries.