Mamdani’s offhand remark about the Koh-I-Noor should spark new efforts to educate students about where many museum treasures actually come from.
It is just after nine in the morning and I am facing a group of about 100 New York City fifth graders, preparing to speak to them about my latest novel for young people, an art repatriation museum heist set at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The auditorium’s stage is full of haphazardly stacked xylophones from a recent school concert, and it is over-warm and stuffy in the way that older city buildings can be in the late spring. Like pupils at any New York area school, these 10- and 11-year-olds on their wooden auditorium seats are of many colors and backgrounds, a wide range of heights and sizes.
The kids are a little restless at first, but thankfully, I have been supplied a cordless microphone, so I’m able to walk among the students as I launch into my interactive presentation, asking them questions and allowing them to sometimes interrupt me in turn. I talk first about the infamous heist of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, and the thief Vincenzo Peruggia’s belief that the Italian masterpiece had been stolen by Napoleon and therefore belonged not in France but Leonardo’s home country of Italy. Soon, I’m connecting this to the issue of colonial looting of art and artifacts — encouraging students to ask the question where the art they see in museums came from, where it belongs and who has a right to own whose treasures. By the time I mention Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s comment late last month that if he were granted time to speak privately with King Charles III during the monarch’s recent visit to the U.S, he would encourage him to return the Koh-I-Noor diamond, the students are entirely engaged, hooting and hollering in outrage at the gall of Britain and other colonial powers.
The famed 105.6-carat Koh-I-Noor, which currently sits in the Tower of London as part of the British crown jewels, has long been a symbol of colonial plunder, as well as a touchstone for the issue of repatriation of looted artifacts to formerly colonized countries. The British Crown claimed the massive diamond in 1849 following the annexation of the Punjab. India, Pakistan and Afghanistan have all since demanded its return, citing that it was obtained through the aggressive and illegal coercion of a 10-year-old boy king after the imprisonment of his mother (Read the full sordid history at Smithsonian Magazine.) The U.K. has resisted; in 2010, then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said, “If you say yes to one, you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty … it is going to have to stay put.”
To whom do looted art and artifacts rightfully belong? When I was a museum-visiting child, I was never taught to ask such questions. Neither were my own now young adult children. Yet the tides of the broader cultural conversation seem to be shifting. The 2025 Louvre heist involving the French crown jewels, for instance, was deemed a “colonial wake up call,” because the gemstones were mined by the French using exploited labor when they laid claim to lands across Asia, Africa, and South America. (For more, read the Associated Press’ description of the jewels’ origins, which “moved through imperial networks that converted global labor, resources — and even slavery — into European prestige.”)
Conversations about colonial looting — and what to do about it — have been increasingly in the zeitgeist. Ryan Coogler’s 2018 “Black Panther” opens with a museum heist scene that gestures to the repatriation of African art and artifacts. There is an entire BBC docuseries entitled “Stuff the British Stole.” Popular internet memes joke that Western museums are crime scenes, and a video game called “Relooted” centers on the stealing back of looted African art.
New York City museums are not above this sort of critique. In 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art returned a few Benin Bronzes — among many taken by the British in an 1897 raid on Benin City — to Nigeria. In 2023, it returned Khmer-era looted artworks to Cambodia and Thailand. In 2024, the museum brought on its first head of provenance research, and has established inventories of repatriated antiquities as well as one for Nazi-era provenance research. Despite these active and ongoing efforts, it continues to possess other objects historians consider looted.
Colonial looting did not limit itself to inanimate objects. In 2023, art historian and legal scholar Erin L. Thompson’s investigative report for Hyperallergic revealed that the American Museum of Natural History had a collection of 12,000 individuals’ bodies and body parts, most from Indigenous and formerly colonized communities. These human remains were often gathered in the name of racist eugenic practices, projects of comparative anatomy designed to prove white racial superiority. Due perhaps to the public outcry after Thompson’s revelations, the museum changed course, declaring it would no longer display such human remains publicly, and closing two major halls displaying Native American objects, due to Biden-era federal regulations requiring museums to obtain consent from indigenous communities prior to displaying cultural items. For many, however, these actions feel long overdue.
As an author of a novel for young people about art repatriation, what I hope Mamdani’s comment does is to open the door to more informed engagement with these issues in our own city. A critical component of New York’s identity is its museums. From the Met Cloisters to the South Street Seaport Museum and everything in between, not only do visitors from everywhere in the world enjoy our museums, but so do the city’s residents. For students, museum visits are often a part of school curricula. Programs like Culture Pass and Cool Culture as well as free museum days and partnerships with educational institutions make New York’s museums accessible to a broad range of its families and children. Yet, as far as I’m aware, there is no consistent curricular component teaching New York’s students about colonial looting, or encouraging young people to ask where museum artifacts come from.
As I have been traveling around New York City schools doing author visits, I’m consistently impressed by how simple the issue of repatriation is to young people: Stuff that was stolen (or obtained under fundamentally immoral or dishonest terms) should be returned. Once presented with the facts, the issue is plain and simple to most of our city’s students, many of whom are themselves from immigrant communities impacted by colonial histories. Yet for adults, whether academic colleagues or family members accompanying young people to events about my book, the issue seems more vexed. As one educator put it to me recently, didn’t repatriation of objects deny children of various immigrant diasporas the right to learn about their own culture? Couldn’t, say, the bombing of Iran have been stopped through more education in the U.S. about the beauty of Persian art?
To me, such comments are consistent with the narratives that justified colonialism itself, the idea that colonialists ‘rescued’ art from irresponsible communities uninterested in or incapable of caring for their own precious treasures. They remind me of Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism — an idea of a backward and barbaric “other” who must be tamed and civilized — which has been used to not only justify colonialism, but continues to inform the way that Western institutions frame and view art from the rest of the world.
The repatriation of ill-gotten works is not simply about possession, but the construction of collective cultural memory and therefore history itself. Diasporic immigrant children cannot learn about their own cultural objects without learning about the violence that brought those objects, and perhaps their own families, to the U.S. Current-day wars cannot unfortunately be avoided by eliding mention about past wars, invasions and colonial violence.
Indeed, conversations about repatriation, in the words of Erin Thompson, can actually enrich and deepen museums, whether that means better and more complete museum education or richer relationships with the communities from which art and artifacts originate. “Repatriation can make an opening rather than leave a hole,” writes Thompson, citing several possibilities, including museums displaying replicas of repatriated objects, alongside videos of the original object in use in its country of origin, or commissioning work from modern-day artists working in their cultural traditions.
Museums are what Michel Foucault called heterotopias, “worlds within worlds,” spaces that represent and reveal truths about the society in which they exist, as well as trouble them. Not just the treasures within museums, but the ethical standards of museums shape the way we understand ourselves, each other, our histories and futures. Even as Mayor Mamdani draws worldwide attention to the Koh-I-Noor’s potential return, his words are an opening for New York City in general, and New York City schools in particular, to deepen museum education. It is an opportunity for the city to ask questions about the looted art and human remains still being held in our museums, while engaging in meaningful conversations about repatriation and reparations. At a time when immigrant communities all over the country are dehumanized and demonized by the president’s rhetoric and terrorized by ICE raids, New York City can change the narrative of what this country should treasure: ill-gotten goods from formerly colonized countries, or immigrant communities from those countries, the kids and families who truly make this city great.
Due to our mayor’s albeit brief comments, New York has a meaningful opportunity right now to become a world leader in the arena of museum ethics and education. Diamonds may be forever, but a citywide anti-colonial museum curriculum could be our metropolis’ best friend.
