That sounds bizarrely stupid. As in, this is playing to all their weaknesses in a war against the whites.
And the politics...it's not much better.
You have to remember that for North American tribes, fighting was done on an individual basis and had no resemblance to European armies. You don't have a King of the Shawnee levying troops from each of his towns for an army led by officers, with beatings for insubordination and execution for desertion. Tribes were rarely led by a single permanent leader, instead each village usually had it's own chief, and fighting forces were simply raised by convincing warriors to come and fight. Bravery and honor were also big parts of the reason for fighting in that style, hanging back would be seen as cowardly, and surrendering was unimaginable.
British support for Indian raids
The Northwest Territory, comprising the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, had been an area of dispute between the Indian Nations and the United States since the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. The British Empire had ceded the area to the United States in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The Indian Nations followed Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet and the brother of Tecumseh. Tenskwatawa had a vision of purifying his society by expelling the "children of the Evil Spirit": the American settlers. Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh formed a confederation of numerous tribes to block American expansion. The British saw the Indian nations as valuable allies and a buffer to its Canadian colonies and provided arms. Attacks on American settlers in the Northwest further aggravated tensions between Britain and the United States. The Confederation's raids hindered American expansion into potentially valuable farmlands in the Northwest Territory.
The British had the long-standing goal of creating a large "neutral" Indian state that would cover much of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. They made the demand as late as the fall of 1814 at the peace conference, but lost control of western Ontario at key battles on Lake Erie, thus giving the Americans control of the proposed neutral zone.
I don't know a ton of information about this plan, but I do know it was attacked very nastily by the British Opposition of the time.
Pardon me for derailing my own thread, but this makes me think-could a nomadic society survive to some degree in the industrial age? Could a nomad-run nation be at least somewhat competetive with the other nations and defend their land effectively, or would such a nation be forced to forgo their free-roaming ways and settle in order to "keep up with the Jones's?"
Yes, nomadic hunter-gatherer societies can survive up to the industrial age, (look at the San of South Africa, although they're in serious trouble) but only by living in areas too remote or desolate for others to intrude on them.
Nomad-run nation is basically an oxymoron, unless you're going by the older definition of nation=ethnic group. There's no such thing as a nomadic-run state, forming into a state is purely a characteristic of sedentary societies. And as long as the land is suitable for agriculture, a nomadic society is always going to lose to an agrarian society, simply because the agrarian society will support 10 times the population of the nomadic one, without even going into advantages due to hierarchy, trade, etc.
What was the REAL aim there? What would have happened if the War of Independance was lost, moderate americans's demand met and all, in theory, if the Crown kept the Colonies? The British Army once marching west?
I can't answer this too in-depth, but settlement west would probably have continued in a more measured fashion, with allied tribes such as the Iroquois being given a wide berth. The 1770s equivalent to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, was mulling proposals to start one new colony in the Ohio territory, and another along the Mississippi, right into 1774. (Random note for ATLs: Benjamin Franklin wrote to him to suggest all new American colonies ought to have have elected governors like Connecticut and Rhode Island. End derail)
That opens up a new possibilty. Didn't the Great Plains originally have farming societies that were overrun by the more nomadic tribes? Those surviving could be a basis for Native societies with the technological capabilities to do better than the white invaders.
Not as much in the Great Plains, but there were definitely farming societies in the Mississippi basin! They built large burial mounds and had pottery and trade. Their problem wasn't being overrun by nomadic tribes, it was decimation by smallpox, etc, in the 16th century. (Though if you really want to get into it, at the time they were already suffering a decline due to the Little Ice Age when the epidemics hit) In fact the death toll caused them to abandon the permanent settlements and
disperse into semi-nomadic tribes, and they were the ancestors of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and many other tribes. I wrote about them some more in another thread, but it would take me awhile to find it.
Sorry for the mega-post.