"[3] Adamson grew up in Akron and spent summers with her relatives in Lumberton, North Carolina,[4][5] where she learned about the history and culture of Native Americans.
[9] 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.
[11] 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.
[11] Her work led to the first microloan fund in the United States associated with a reservation, the first tribal investment model.
This was a national movement for reservation land reform, and legislation on federal trust responsibility for Native Americans.
She convinced the World Bank to create the First Global Indigenous Peoples' Facility Fund to make small building grants.
[2] She has been a member of the editorial boards of Indian Country Today, Native Americas, and for Akwe:kon Journal.
[9] 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.