During the first fifty years of French colonial rule in Algeria, French scholars, military Orientalists of the Arab Bureaux, and Catholic priests established the region’s earliest archaeological museums. Seeking to protect artifacts from looting and destruction, these actors curated small museological collections largely without funding or oversight from the colonial administration in Algiers or the Ministre de l’Instruction Publique et Beaux-Arts in Paris. But they did rely heavily upon the support of Arabo-Berber residents of Algeria. Arabic and Berber individuals can be found in the early histories of the museums published by the French Ministre de l’Instruction Publique et Beaux Arts, as well as journals published by the Société historique algérienne. They conducted private archaeological excavations, donated objects to museum collections, provided buildings to house nascent institutions, and translated and transcribed Arabic inscriptions in museum collections. This paper seeks to bring those contributions to light, highlighting the means by which indigenous Algerians contributed to Algeria’s nineteenth-century museum culture. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, however, colonial administrators and metropolitan bureaucrats sought to consolidate Algerian archaeological artifacts from communal and regional museums into one flagship historical museum in Algiers, which would become the Musée national des antiquités algèriennes. In addition to physically moving artifacts to an institution miles away from their original locations, this act also reinforced social and cultural barriers that prevented Arabo-Berber Algerians from accessing their cultural property. While the language of cultural restitution often assumes that artifacts have been physically removed and taken to Europe, I argue that even those artifacts that remained within the borders of the colony were subject to colonial looting. Although indigenous actors actively supported the creation of local museological institutions, which generally did not impede their ability to view and study artifacts and artworks, the French-style Musée national des antiquités algèriennes was plagued by imperial strictures restricting indigenous access to cultural property. This paper hopes to prove through the example of nineteenth-century Algeria that the current scholarly and popular concept of cultural restitution must expand beyond a simple discussion of returning objects from one country to another. Rather, we must critically reexamine individual institutions – particularly those in the former colonies - to understand and effectively dismantle their colonial legacies for the future.