 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.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."