Ann Rockefeller Roberts, a champion of the rights, welfare and culture of Native Americans and the eldest daughter of Nelson A. Rockefeller, the former vice president and governor of New York, died on Wednesday at her home in Bedford, N.Y. She was 90.
Her son, Joseph Pierson, said the cause was complications of surgery to repair a broken thigh bone after a fall.
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.
nolimit cityIn 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.
Mr. Biden has struggled throughout his presidency to balance his desire to brag about his economic record and policies with a need to acknowledge voters’ frustration over the inflation surge that the nation experienced in his first two years in office.
She was instrumental in the transfer of the vast Heye Foundation collection of Native American artifacts from an unheralded site in Washington 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.
ImageSome of the artifacts on display in 2005 at the George Gustav Heye Center, a Manhattan. Below, Ms. Roberts in 2010.Credit...Philip Greenberg for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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