"It belongs in a MUSEUM...um, in the country of origin."

British Museum... Nothing British about it, everything in it was looted.

Until the 1970s or so, there was no expectation that a National Museum would be *about* a nation. Rather, it provided a surrogate for travel for the people of Britain, who could learn a little about far-off places when they weren't able to go there.
Obviously the emergence of legal notions of cultural property has undermined this premise (as has greater access to travel, availability of digital copies of artefacts, etc).

The Peabody Museum currently has an exhibition that is attempting to historicize the anthropologists (Bingham etc) and to antiquate them, in a sense. Call it a kind of postmodern museology, where the anthropologists become the anthropologized.

Yes, better that the looters are in museums than the loot itself.

They thought they were saving the stuff. Natives couldn't be trusted.

Ther irony, in some cases, is that it was only because Europeans / Americans practised "salvage ethnography" that there is now something for the Natives to reclaim.