eastern_eth0s

Cultural artifacts have been separated from these peoples, separated from their context, and stored in European archival rooms since first contact. When doing this a trade is made -- the full context and meaning of the item is traded for possession of the sterile physical item itself. Extracted artifacts often did not come along with the meaning of the object, or the practices and traditions associated with it -- many times because they were private or sacred to the peoples from which the object was extracted.

So if your intent was to understand the culture and tradition of these peoples, or their artifacts, it makes a lot of sense to respect their traditions and cultural practices. As you know though things never quite happened this way -- there was a genocide -- extermination of their culture and people. So given the complete lack of respect or willingness to follow this principle historically, along with a genocide, researchers are especially careful to respect the wishes of the peoples whose stories, artifacts, traditions they are dealing with.