History Memes

It's an interesting conundrum. What inspiration could a local population get from seeing artifacts of their lands ancestors and how they lived?

They might have, but there is evidence that they didn't. At the very least not any society they would deem as savage, brutish or sacreligious. There is a long history of people that didn't value recording the past. It's frustratingly one of the many reasons that most of recorded history is either Chinese or Christian.

How does the securing and profiteering of those said artifacts by outside forces effect the area (economically and religiously) and the populations opinion on those historic and ancient sites when abused and seen as an excuse to enslave and brutalize the locals?

Don't know, but its hardly a new occurrence. It has always been the case that property and land is subject to conflict. The difference is that the Renaissance and industrial age GREATLY affected the outcome between those that has technology and those that didn't.

Who, in those outside forces that come to remove what they seem valuable, gets to determine what is cared for/sold and preserved? What positive narrative do they wish to portray of a land and people that they have no real connection too?

Its of course easy to be self righteous after the fact, but given the times when they happened, most of us wouldn't have any choice in the matter. I would perhaps equate it to something like clothes today. You know that a child likely made the clothes you wear, but would you go naked outside? The artefacts where either purchased by a ruler of the land, or taken by the proposed rulers of the land, so it would be theirs by right.

History has already shown the outcomes in museums when we refer to barbaric and "savage" people. Do you really think those institutions have always had the best in mind when concerning all of this?

Like i said earlier, acting like other people were savages wasn't exactly a new occurrence in the Imperial age. Just exacerbated by difference in technology. I don't think that they did, but to compare them to institutions of today more than a hundred years after the fact is just not relevant in my eyes.