Ann Rockefeller Roberts, a champion of the rights, welfare and culture of Native Americans and the eldest daughter of former Vice President and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, died Wednesday at her home in Bedford, New York. She was 90.

The cause was complications of surgery to repair a broken thigh bone after a fall, her son, Joseph Pierson, said.

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, Roberts founded the Fund of the Four Directions, which provided grants to Native American grassroots organizations to help them invigorate their traditional ceremonial practices and languages, revive farming techniques to raise Native foods, and reclaim 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.

Her work on behalf of Native Americans was recognized in 2017 by the Interfaith Center of New York when it presented her with its James Parks Morton Award, named after the center’s founder; previous recipients include former President Bill Clinton, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and the Dalai Lama.

Roberts immersed herself in civic affairs beginning in the late 1960s, first in the civil rights movement, financing largely futile efforts by Mayor Charles Evers, whose activist brother Medgar was assassinated in 1963, to transform Fayette, Mississippi, into a model integrated community.

She involved herself in the feminist movement as a founding member of Women’s World Banking, which lent money to enterprising women in developing countries, and as a supporter of a bipartisan women’s coalition in Congress.

Roberts also published two books. The first, “Mr. Rockefeller’s Roads: The Untold Story of Acadia’s Carriage Roads and Their Creator” (1990), was about the 57 miles of carriage roads and 17 granite and cobblestone bridges that her grandfather John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of the oil magnate and philanthropist, designed and built on Mount Desert Island in Maine. He eventually donated 51 miles of roadway and 11,000 acres there to Acadia National Park.

“He realized that he had no desire to pursue his father’s business interests or to make more money,” Roberts wrote. He bought a huge Tudor-style house on the island, in Seal Harbor, where Nelson Rockefeller was born.

Her other book, “The Rockefeller Family Home: Kykuit” (1998), is a portrait of the country estate that John D. Rockefeller Sr. built in Pocantico Hills, New York. Kykuit (pronounced KAI-cut) — Dutch for lookout point, as it overlooks the Hudson River — was home to generations of his descendants. It is now a national historic site.

Both books are illustrated with photographs by Roberts’ daughter Mary Louise Pierson, who died in July.

From 1974 to 1980, Roberts chaired the board of the Rockefeller Family Fund, the philanthropic organization administered by “the cousins” — the offspring of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s children.

After Nelson Rockefeller died in 1979, Roberts bought some 3,500 items of Mexican folk art that he had collected, curated them and donated them to the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas and the Mexican Museum in San Francisco. Before he died, he had asked her to help negotiate the Heye Foundation transfer of Native American artifacts.

“The unexpected joyousness of those who are under the heel is something she understood,” her daughter Clare Pierson said in a phone interview. “And once she met the Native Americans associated with the Heye collection, she saw the same spirit as she had seen among Black people in the South.”

Ann Clark Rockefeller was born on May 12, 1934, in Manhattan, a great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Sen. Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. She was the second child of Nelson Rockefeller and his first wife, Mary Todhunter Clark. She graduated from the Brearley School in Manhattan and earned a bachelor’s degree at Wellesley College for Women in Massachusetts, where she was also awarded a master’s degree in biblical history and English literature. She received a master’s in landscape architecture from the University of Virginia School of Architecture in Charlottesville.

Her three marriages — to the Rev. Robert Pierson, an Episcopal priest; Lionel Coste Jr., an architect; and T. George Harris, a journalist and magazine editor — ended in divorce.

During her last marriage, Roberts adopted a less conspicuous surname, the maiden name of her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Roberts Clark.