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Indian Wars is the name used in the United States to describe a series of conflicts between the colonial or federal government and the native people of North America.

The earliest English settlers in what would become the United States often enjoyed peaceful relations with nearby tribes. However, as early as the Pequot War of 1637, the colonists were taking sides in military rivalries between native nations in order to assure colonial security and open further land for settlement. The wars, which ranged from the seventeenth-century (King Philip's War, King William's War, and Queen Anne's War at the opening of the eighteenth century) to the Wounded Knee massacre and "closing" of the American frontier in 1890, generally resulted in the opening of Native American lands to further colonization, the conquest of Native Americans and their assimilation, or forced relocation to Indian reservations.

A controversy continues on the question of whether the American Indian Wars were part of a genocide of Native Americans. Scholars take different positions in the ongoing genocide debate. Various statistics have been developed concerning the devastation of these wars on the peoples involved. The best-documented figures are derived from collated records of strictly military engagements such as by Gregory Michno which reveal 21,586 dead, wounded, and captured civilians and soldiers for the period of 1850–90. Other figures are derived from extrapolations of rather cursory and unrelated government accounts such as that by Russell Thornton who calculated that some 45,000 Native Americans and 19,000 whites were killed in battle. This later rough estimate includes women and children on both sides, since noncombatants were often killed in frontier massacres. Whether non-combat deaths resulting indirectly from war (for instance the 4,000 Cherokees who died on the Trail of Tears) should be reckoned part of the legacy of the Indian Wars is a matter of fierce debate. Then, as today, many deaths involved hunger, disease, and intertribal violence set in motion by the disruptions of war, but not direct violence. When these deaths are counted, the number of Native Americans who died from the results of wars is generally accepted to be orders of magnitude higher than those killed outright. Academic estimates of deaths resulting from war and the results of war range from historian David Stannard's total of 100 million (for all of the Americas) to political scientist R. J. Rummel's estimate of 2 million to 15 million, with a common figure cited being 10 million people.

What is not disputed is that the savagery from both sides was such as to be noted in newspapers, historical archives, diplomatic reports, and the United States Declaration of Independence. ("…[He] has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.")

The Indian Wars comprised a series of smaller wars. Native Americans, diverse peoples with their own distinct tribal histories, were no more a single people than the Europeans. Living in societies organized in a variety of ways, Native Americans usually made decisions about war and peace at the local level, though they sometimes fought as part of formal alliances, such as the Iroquois Confederation, or in temporary confederacies inspired by leaders such as Tecumseh.