The dominant framework was scientific and acquisitive simultaneously.

Anthropologists, archaeologists, military surgeons, and collectors operating within the intellectual culture of the era treated Native American bodies, belongings, and cultural objects as specimens to be gathered, catalogued, and preserved for scientific and educational purposes.

The consent of the communities from which these objects came was not considered relevant within this framework — indeed, the framework often assumed that Native people were a vanishing population whose material culture needed to be preserved by institutions precisely because Native communities themselves were not expected to survive to maintain it.

This assumption was both wrong and self-serving.