Abstract:
After the Civil War, laws passed by the North Carolina General Assembly to retain the power of the white community divided the races between \"white\" and \"colored.\" For the state's Native American population, this posed a problem. They could not attend white churches, and they feared attending black churches would cause them to lose their identity as Indians. Their solution was to build their own churches. In the eastern part of the state, missionaries and preachers had converted many Indians to Christianity by the late 1800s. Most of the churches built were either Baptist or Methodist. By the 2000, most of the state's 100,000 Indians follow these two denominations.