Petition Calls for US to Give Slice of Minnesota to Canada

A petition on the White House website calls for the government to make America great again by giving part of the country to Canada. The petition urges the government to correct a centuries-old geographic error by giving Canada a part of Minnesota known as the Northwest Angle, the CBC reports. The Angle, which lies between the provinces of Manitoba and Ontario, is the only part of the US outside Alaska above the 49th parallel. It ended up as American territory after the 1783 Treaty of Paris negotiations, in which Benjamin Franklin and British negotiators used a flawed 1755 map created by American botanist John Mitchell. The Angle is cut off from the rest of the US by the Lake of the Woods, meaning residents need to travel through Canada to get there by land.

The area has around 120 residents and 123 square miles of land, including several islands. Make America great "by correcting this critical survey error," urges the petition, which had been signed by over 4,200 people as of Sunday. It needs more than 98,000 more signatures by the end of January to get a response from the White House—and many Angle residents hope it doesn't get that far. "We’re proud to be neighbors, but that is where we draw the line—figuratively and literally," resident Lisa Goulet tells the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Red Lake Nation, which owns around 80% of the Angle, is also against the move. "It belongs to our tribe. We don’t support that idea," says tribal Chairman Darrell Seki Sr. (Lobstermen have been feuding over two disputed islands between Maine and New Brunswick.)