Indian barrier state

The Indian barrier state was an unrealised British proposal to establish a Native American buffer state in the Great Lakes region of North America. It was intended to consist of territory west of the Appalachian Mountains and bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers along with the Great Lakes. British officials first conceived of establishing such a state in 1755 during the French and Indian War, and the idea grew in importance after the war ended and Native dissatisfaction with the British resulted in Pontiac's War.

After the Great Lakes region was ceded to the United States in the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War, British officials and Native chiefs pursued efforts to organize the various tribes within it into the Northwestern Confederacy, which would form the basis of an Indian state independent of the United States and under British protection. Their goal was to protect the British component of the North American fur trade from American merchants and to block the westward expansion of American colonizers.

Among the plan's most ardent proponents were Mohawk leader Joseph Brant and Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe. In 1814, the British government abandoned efforts to bring such a state into being with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent with the United States, which ended the War of 1812.