Rebecca Adamson

In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux asked her to develop and coordinate an investor engagement strategy to pressure the builders of the Dakota Access Pipeline to change the planned route which was to pass near a river used for potable water near their reservation. She was able to secure statements from ESG investors with over $1.7 trillion in invested assets requesting that the banks funding the pipeline support the tribe's request to reroute the pipeline. Her efforts helped to embolden activists who forced shareholder resolutions to require that the environmental and social risks were more adequately disclosed (including at Marathon Petroleum, Enbridge, and Wells Fargo) and encouraged over 500 NGOs to pressure the banks financing the pipeline with three major banks pulling out of the syndication (BNP Paribas, DNB ASA, and ING) and ten other banks supported strengthening the Equator Principles.

She writes a monthly column for Indian Country Today newspaper. When asked about her accomplishments in 2015, she said, "I come from a matrilineal society and having women be a source of power was there in my DNA."

In 2012, she was featured as one of the most influential women in America on PBS' MAKERS: Women Who Make America program.

In 1996, she was awarded the Robert W. Scrivner Award from the Council on Foundations for grant-making and the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development's Jay Silverheels Award. Ms. magazine named her one of their seven "Women of the Year" in 1997. In 1998, Who Cares magazine named her one of the top 10 Social Entrepreneurs of the Year. In 2001 she was received the John W. Gardener Leadership Award. In 2004, she was Scwab's Outstanding Social Entrepreneur.

In 1992, she became an adviser for the Catholic Conference's Campaign for Human Development. She has also served on the President's Council on Sustainable Development/Sustainable Communities Task Force.

In 1982, she became founder and president of First Nations Development Institute in Falmouth, Virginia to promote economic development by founding commercial enterprises on reservations. In 1986, she served as an adviser on rural development for the United Nations (UN) during their Decade of Women. She became the adviser for the UN's International Labor Organization International Indigenous Rights from 1988-1989. She has also served on the board of directors for the National Center for Enterprise Development and the Council on Foundations.

From 1972-1976, she was a member of the board of directors of Denver, Colorado's Coalition of Indian-Controlled School Boards, where she worked toward synthesizing and facilitating policy reform at the national level. The Coalition worked to "wrest control of Indian schools from the U.S. government and Christian religious groups that had been running them for more than 100 years." Her work contributed to the Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975.

After graduating from Firestone High School in Akron in 1967, she studied philosophy at the University of Akron and then took courses in law and economics at Piedmont College in Georgia. Adamson left college in 1970 to work on western reservations to help end the practice of removing Native American children from their homes and placing them in government or missionary-ran boarding schools in the hope of destroying their connections to their native languages and cultures.

Rebecca Adamson (born 1950) is an American Cherokee businessperson and advocate. She is former director, former president, and founder of First Nations Development Institute and the founder of First Peoples Worldwide.