structural:scholar_edition, quality:correction
Native Americans

Most Indigenous people rejected pleas that they remain neutral and instead supported the British Crown. The great majority of the 200,000 Indigenous people east of the Mississippi distrusted the Americans and supported the British cause, hoping to forestall continued expansion of settlement into their territories. Those tribes closely involved in trade tended to side with the Patriots, although political factors were important as well. Some tried to remain neutral, seeing little value in joining what they perceived to be a "white man's war", and fearing reprisals from whichever side they opposed.

The great majority of Indigenous people did not participate directly in the war, with the notable exceptions of warriors and bands associated with four of the Iroquois tribes in New York and Pennsylvania which allied with the British, and the Oneida and Tuscarora tribes among the Iroquois of central and western New York who supported the American cause. The British did have other allies, particularly in the regions of southwest Quebec on the Patriot's frontier. The British provided arms to Indigenous people who were led by Loyalists in war parties to raid frontier settlements from the Carolinas to New York. These war parties managed to kill many settlers on the frontier, especially in Pennsylvania and New York's Mohawk Valley.

In 1776, Cherokee war parties attacked American Colonists all along the southern Quebec frontier of the uplands throughout the Washington District, North Carolina (now Tennessee) and the Kentucky wilderness area. The Chickamauga Cherokee under Dragging Canoe allied themselves closely with the British, and fought on for an additional decade after the Treaty of Paris was signed. They launched raids with roughly 200 warriors, as seen in the Cherokee–American wars; they could not mobilize enough forces to invade settler areas without the help of allies, most often the Creek.

Joseph Brant (also Thayendanegea) of the powerful Mohawk tribe in New York was the most prominent Indigenous leader against the Patriot forces. In 1778 and 1780, he led 300 Iroquois warriors and 100 white Loyalists in multiple attacks on small frontier settlements in New York and Pennsylvania, killing many settlers and destroying villages, crops, and stores.

In 1779, the Continental Army forced the hostile Indigenous people out of upstate New York when Washington sent an army under John Sullivan which destroyed 40 evacuated Iroquois villages in central and western New York. The Battle of Newtown proved decisive, as the Patriots had an advantage of three-to-one, and it ended significant resistance; there was little combat otherwise. Facing starvation and homeless for the winter, the Iroquois fled to Canada.

At the peace conference following the war, the British ceded lands which they did not really control, without consultation with their Indigenous allies. They transferred control to the United States of all the land south of the Great Lakes east of the Mississippi and north of Florida. Calloway concludes:

Burned villages and crops, murdered chiefs, divided councils and civil wars, migrations, towns and forts choked with refugees, economic disruption, breaking of ancient traditions, losses in battle and to disease and hunger, betrayal to their enemies, all made the American Revolution one of the darkest periods in American Indian history.