Bury the hatchet

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This article is about the American English phrase. For the album by the Cranberries, see Bury the Hatchet (album).

Bury the hatchet is an American English colloquialism meaning "to make peace." The phrase is an allusion to the figurative or literal practice of putting away the tomahawk at the cessation of hostilities among or by Native Americans in the Eastern United States, specifically concerning the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy and in Iroquois custom in general. Weapons were to be buried or otherwise cached in time of peace.

This practice was most famously used in recent time during the 1990 Oka Crisis in Canada, although the weapons were not buried. Faced by an ultimatum that would've seen battle with the Canadian Forces the next day, the besieged Mohawk Warriors piled and burned their weapons, and then walked out of the cordon that had been tightened around them. The alternative was a bloody siege battle, which could have triggered off further violent resistance to the Canadian government far beyond the immediate locality of the crisis, which centred on Montreal's suburbs of Oka, Quebec (Kanesatake) and Kahnawake. Mohawk commentators stated at the time that this was not a surrender, but a cession of hostilities, as per the burying of weapons of honoured tradition.^{[citation needed]}