General
Ann Rockefeller Roberts, Champion of Native Americans, Dies at 90
The eldest daughter of Nelson Rockefeller, she founded a nonprofit to support Indigenous culture and helped fill two Smithsonian institutions with artifacts.
Ann Rockefeller Roberts, a champion of the rights, welfare and culture of Native Americans and the eldest daughter of former Vice President and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, died on Wednesday at her home in Bedford, N.Y. She was 90.
The cause was complications of surgery to repair a broken thigh bone after a fall, her son, Joseph Pierson, said.
Ms. Roberts “had a great empathy for the plight of the Native American people and a great affinity for their culture, rituals, reverence for the land,” her sister, Mary Morgan, said in a phone interview.
In 1979, Ms. Roberts founded the Fund of the Four Directions, which provided grants to Native American grass roots organizations to help them invigorate their traditional ceremonial practices and languages, revive farming techniques to raise native foods, and reclaim Native sovereignty and treaty rights through legal action. The fund later merged with the Flying Eagle Woman Fund.
She was instrumental in the transfer of the vast Heye Foundation collection of Native American artifacts from an unheralded site in Hamilton Heights in Upper Manhattan to two institutions: the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened on the National Mall in Washington in 2004, and its branch in Lower Manhattan, the George Gustav Heye Center, an exhibition and educational venue housed at the U.S. Custom House on Bowling Green.
