Incomindios team

We are an autonomous, politically independent organization. Our board makes the strategic and content-related decisions. Our work is supported by active members, interns and permanent staff of the office.

Permanent staff and dossiers managers

Pascal Elsner

Management

Pascal Elsner has been the Managing Director of Incomindios since June 2017. He studied ethnology and environmental sciences and completed postgraduate studies in civil peacebuilding and conflict-sensitive project management. During field research in the Amazon, he has worked extensively on oil exploration and community-based tourism on Indigenous land.

He has volunteered in various peacebuilding projects in Kenya and Brazil.

He also works as a freelancer in the field of cinema technology for open-air cinemas.

He is the father of two children and lives with his family in Zurich.

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Nina Reuther

Project INSCHU

Nina Reuther has a doctorate in music ethnology and has been researching Indigenous systems of access rights to tangible and intangible cultural assets with a focus on North America since the late 1980s. She spent many years on the reservations of the Secwepemc Nation (British Columbia/Canada); she has since been involved in different ways of mediating between Indigenous and European ways of thinking, e.g. through accompanying and translating Indigenous delegates and artists and through projects, workshops and seminars for people of all ages across Europe on various topics related to the historical experiences and current situations of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. At the beginning of 2021 she was entrusted with the (re)construction of the INSCHU project (Incomindios in schools).

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Helena Nyberg

Mandate Member Magazine, UNO

Helena Nyberg has been a member of Incomindios since 1980. As a qualified conference interpreter and translator, she has connected her profession to the association from the very beginning. To this day she maintains contact with partner organizations in North America and Europe, is responsible for publishing the members' magazine MagazINC and strives to continuously monitor the situation of Indigenous Peoples.

Her main areas of focus are political rights and resource exploitation and their impacts on Indigenous Peoples, specifically concerning uranium and coal. In this capacity she represents Incomindios as an advisor in the Swiss Energy Foundation SES and in the Alliance Nein-zu-neuen-AKW and is a board member of AMERINDIAS.

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Aline Kunz

Intern

Aline has been an intern at Incomindios since January 2024. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Social Sciences and Sustainable Development at the University of Bern. Before starting her Master's in Global Studies at the University of Lucerne, she would like to gain professional experience in a human rights organization at Incomindios.

Through her voluntary work at a school for socially disadvantaged children in Huancayo, Peru, and her travels through South America, she has already been able to gain first insights into indigenous cultures and is looking forward to delving deeper into the topic.

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Our board

Anna Cristina Peterson

Department of Communication and Fundraising, Co-president

Anna Cristina Peterson holds a Master's degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Bern. Her interest in Indigenous communities and other minority groups developed during her childhood growing up in a village outside Bogota, Colombia, where she lived with various minority groups. After completing her Master's degree, she unexpectedly stumbled upon the profession of fundraiser, which she hopes to further develop and expand her knowledge.

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Barbara Stulz

Department of Environment & Resources

After a 6-month internship, Barbara Stulz was elected to the board of Incomindios in 2018 and is now responsible for the "Rights" and "Resources" departments. Barbara has a bachelor's degree in ethnology and a master's degree in human rights & politics. She is particularly interested in the issues of human rights, natural resources and extractivism with a focus on Latin America – issues that often also have a strong impact on Indigenous communities. Barbara lived in La Paz (Bolivia) for 6 months and in Mexico for 2 years, where she worked in civil society organizations in the field of human rights. At the moment Barbara is back in Bolivia and works for the Better Gold Initiative (BGI), a Swiss project that promotes sustainable value chains of gold from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia to Switzerland.

She is a founding member of Incomindios UK.

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Elida Villalba Vargas

Department of Indigenous Rights & UN, Department of Environment & Resources, Legal & Politics Department

Elida Villalba Vargas has more than 20 years of legal experience. She holds a Master's Degree in Law from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a Master's Degree in Human Rights from the University of Castilla-la Mancha, and a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and her doctoral thesis focused on the study of community water management. She has worked as a legal advisor and consultant in different countries and has collaborated with Incomindios as an intern. She is currently developing projects related to access to water for Indigenous communities in Paraguay. Her goal is to make visible the effects of climate change on human rights, especially the violation of the rights of Indigenous peoples.

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José Meléndez

Department of Indigenous Rights & UNO, Department of Education & Culture

José Meléndez holds an interdisciplinary Master's in Latin American Studies from the University of Bern. As part of his Master’s thesis, he dealt with the legitimacy of Indigenous justice in Ecuadorian Constitutional Law from 2008. Since October 2019, José Meléndez has been working on his PhD project “La paradoja del género de Indígenas Queer: Re-pensando la estructura del género y las identidades sexuales desde la Cosmovision Indígena en Bolivia y Ecuador (1980-2020)” at the doctoral program for Global Studies at the University of Bern. In his work he explores the gender structures and sexual identities of the Indigenous Peoples of Ecuador and Bolivia. José has been on the board of Incomindios since 2020.

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Alicia Krömer

Department of Indigenous Rights & UNO, Department of Education & Culture, Co-president

Alicia Krömer is from Canada. She has an MA and PhD in Political Science with a focus on Minority, Human and Indigenous Rights. She has worked on a film production in collaboration with Indigenous groups in Canada and has taught at the University of Vienna, at City, University of London and at SOAS in the UK. She has worked and published articles for Minority Rights Group International and Survival International. She has been with Incomindios since 2017, represents the organization at the United Nations and is a member of the board. She also previously worked at the United Nations in Vienna. She is a founding member of Incomindios UK and lives in the UK.

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Carmen Kronenberg Müller

Finance Department, Legal & Politics Department

Carmen Kronenberg Müller lives in the canton of Aargau and has been rooted in numbers since her apprenticeship as a commercial employee. With targeted business education and training, she is a generalist in the field of finance / accounting, HR and administration and uses these skills for Incomindios since March 2023 as a financially responsible board member. She has been involved with the life, culture and fate of Indigenous peoples around the world since her teenage years. Several individual trips to the Indigenous peoples of North America resulted in valuable encounters and personal contacts.

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Karin Kaufmann

Department of Communication

Karin Kaufmann comes from Zurich and studied ethnology and Russian literature (MA) at the University of Zurich. Since 2017 she has been working in ethnographic museums, first at the Museum der Kulturen Basel and since 2019 as a research assistant at the NONAM North American Native Museum in Zurich. For exhibitions she works with Indigenous artists and scientists. She deals with processes of decolonization of museum collections, and works to ensure that the communities of origin have unrestricted access to their cultural assets and the knowledge contained therein. By working at Incomindios, she wants to understand the current political and legal challenges and options for action of the Indigenous communities in North and South America and create awareness for the issues among the Swiss population. After an internship at Incomindios in spring 2020, she was elected to the board and is involved in the communications department.

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