Bury the hatchet is an American English

American English

American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

 colloquialism

Colloquialism

A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech, academic writing, or paralinguistics. Dictionaries often display colloquial words and phrases with the abbreviation colloq. as an identifier...

 meaning "to make peace." The phrase is an allusion to the figurative or literal practice of putting away the tomahawk

Tomahawk (axe)

A tomahawk is a type of axe native to North America, traditionally resembling a hatchet with a straight shaft. The name came into the English language in the 17th century as a transliteration of the Powhatan word.Tomahawks were general purpose tools used by Native Americans and European Colonials...

 at the cessation of hostilities among or by Native Americans

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...

 in the Eastern United States, specifically concerning the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy and in Iroquois

Iroquois

The Iroquois , also known as the Haudenosaunee or the "People of the Longhouse", are an association of several tribes of indigenous people of North America...

 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

Oka Crisis

The Oka Crisis was a land dispute between a group of Mohawk people and the town of Oka, Quebec, Canada which began on July 11, 1990 and lasted until September 26, 1990. At least one person died as a result...

 in Canada, although the weapons were not buried. Faced by an ultimatum that would have seen battle with the Canadian Forces the next day, the besieged Mohawk

Mohawk nation

Mohawk are the most easterly tribe of the Iroquois confederation. They call themselves Kanien'gehaga, people of the place of the flint...

 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

Oka, Quebec

-References:...

 (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.

The phrase was used in 1759 by the Shawnee orator Missiweakiwa when it became obvious that the French war effort during the Seven Year's War (French and Indian War)

French and Indian War

The French and Indian War is the common American name for the war between Great Britain and France in North America from 1754 to 1763. In 1756, the war erupted into the world-wide conflict known as the Seven Years' War and thus came to be regarded as the North American theater of that war...

was collapsing. The Shawnees had sided with the French against the English, but now the Shawnee would "bury the bloody Hatchet" with the English.