Arctic material
Hunting equipment and clothing from the unforgiving Inuit world.
Michael Gäbler — CC BY 3.0 · Karl Bodmer — Public domain · Parpan05 — CC BY 4.0 · Parpan05 — CC BY 4.0
If the subject interests you — or you have a child drawn to stories of Indigenous peoples — then yes: a quiet, respectful, well-made museum, and a quarter of an hour by tram hardly counts as far. But if you have one day and one museum in Zurich, choose differently: the **Kunsthaus** for art, or the **Rietberg** for world cultures inside a park. The compromise is to make NONAM part of a half day in Seefeld with a walk by the lake.
Yes, from around six upwards. The material is tangible and visual — masks, boats, clothing, tools — and the museum is small enough not to exhaust them, with a low child's fare (and free under six). But it is not a loud interactive centre, so do not expect games and screens in every corner. A short focused visit followed by an ice cream by the lake is the formula that works.
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A small museum in the Seefeld quarter east of Zurich, given over entirely to the Indigenous cultures of North America: the First Nations of Canada, the Inuit of the Arctic, and the peoples of the Great Plains and the Northwest Coast. It is one of very few museums in Europe devoted to this subject alone. It grew out of the private collection of a Zurich schoolteacher, Gottfried Hotz, and his wife Martha, which the city bought in **1961** and opened to the public in **1963** as the Indianermuseum; it reopened in **2003** under its present name — and the change of name carries a message: it dropped the word "Indian" and, with it, the outlook of the old ethnographic museum. What you see now is embroidered clothing, basketry, masks, carving and Arctic hunting equipment, alongside work by living artists from these same peoples — the museum is concerned with their present, not only their past, and that is what distinguishes it. Keep expectations realistic: it is small, an hour to ninety minutes covers it, it sits a little outside the centre, it opens in the afternoon on most days and closes on Mondays. But it is quiet, carefully made, and suits children over six. Pair it with a walk along the eastern lakeshore in Seefeld, one of the pleasanter parts of Zurich to be on foot.
Hunting equipment and clothing from the unforgiving Inuit world.
Work by living artists from these peoples, not only historic objects.
The museum sits on the edge of one of Zurich's nicest lakeside walks.
Seefeldstrasse 317, 8008 Zürich