Bury the hatchet Neutral

To make peace with someone, ending a quarrel or conflict and agreeing to move forward without hostility.

Unlike a simple apology, the phrase implies a mutual, deliberate decision by both sides to set aside the conflict for good, not just a temporary truce.

The phrase comes from a documented Native American peacemaking ritual, most famously associated with the Iroquois Confederacy (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations), who are recorded as having buried weapons at the foot of a white pine — the Great Tree of Peace — as early as the 1400s to seal a treaty. European colonists documented the custom directly: the 1644 Jesuit Relations describe a ceremony in which participants vow “to hurl the hatchet so far into the depths of the earth that it shall never again be seen,” and the Massachusetts colonist Samuel Sewall recorded a 1680 negotiation in which English and Mohawk representatives “buried two Axes in the Ground; one for English another for themselves.” The phrase later entered formal diplomatic language, appearing in Article 11 of the 1795 Treaty of Hopewell, before settling into the everyday figurative sense used today.

After years of not speaking, the two brothers finally buried the hatchet at their mother’s funeral.

The rival companies decided to bury the hatchet and form a joint venture instead of competing.

It’s time to bury the hatchet — this argument has gone on far too long.

A: “Are you two still not talking?” B: “No, we buried the hatchet last week over coffee.”