About
Zam DeShields
About
I'm a Chickasaw Nation citizen. I spent eight years leading planning, housing, public works, and community development for two tribal nations — Samish Indian Nation and Swinomish Indian Tribal Community. Then I joined Microsoft as a contractor to help stand up their Indigenous Program Office, which I went on to run globally across the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
That work — working with Indigenous communities on AI machine translation, low-resource language tools, and data governance at the scale of a Fortune-50 — sharpened a question I've been pursuing since: not whether AI is useful, but who controls it, where data goes, and what it costs communities to trust a system they didn't build.
I run an independent consulting practice through ZD LLC. My work spans Indigenous data sovereignty, local and community-controlled AI infrastructure, and the practical intersection of technology and self-determination. I work with tribal governments, nonprofits, academic institutions, and organizations taking AI adoption seriously enough to question it.
I also work with individuals — people who aren't developers or security professionals but who want to understand what their phone, their apps, and the tools they use every day are actually doing with their data.
My work is shaped by tribal governance, disability justice, and the reality that for trans people, Indigenous communities, and people with disabilities, privacy is often survival. I'm not a neutral technologist. I approach AI and data questions from an anti-surveillance, anti-extraction, community-sovereignty perspective — because I'd rather be clear than pretend to be neutral.
The organizing question in my practice is about ownership: who controls the infrastructure, who captures the value, and who bears the cost. That lens shaped how I built programs inside Microsoft, how I ran planning departments for tribal governments, and how I think about the future of AI for Indigenous communities.
I'm a graduate student in Rehabilitation Counseling at Western Washington University. That program grounds my technology practice in direct community support and disability justice. It's also the reason I'm careful about how AI tools get deployed in contexts where people's access to services, income, or healthcare can be mediated by an algorithm they didn't consent to.
I'm also building Indigenous AI Commons — a living index of resources on AI, data sovereignty, and community-led technology. If you're looking for frameworks, reading lists, or references, start there.
I've presented or engaged with:
US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network · Local Contexts · Native Nations Institute · Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS, UMass Amherst) · Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission Tribal Coding Group · Government of Nunavut · University of Alberta Indigenous Research Symposium