Sacred relics of a 19th-century indigenous chief are to go back to Canada after Exeter city council voted for their return, a move described by a leading curator as a sign that local councils were becoming the pioneers of repatriation.

The Devon council voted to return the items to the Siksika Nation, in Canada, after guidance from curators at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), which holds the sacred relics that once belonged to Crowfoot, a Blackfoot leader who signed a treaty in 1877 with forces of the Crown.

The return of the regalia, which include a buckskin shirt, leggings and a knife bought for £10 in 1904 from the family of an English-born member of the Canadian mounted police, followed a formal request made for the repatriation in 2015. It resolves a drawn-out dispute that has beenacrimonious at times.

In February leaders from the Blackfoot-run cultural and educational centre, the Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, told the Guardian they had been shocked by their interactions with RAMM. The museum, they said, had challenged the repatriation claim by alleging that the park was not an accredited museum.

“It is like Siksika and Crowfoot are in a long dark tunnel with no end in sight,” said Stephen Yellow Old Woman, general manager of BCHP, who said the repatriation initiative dated to 2008. However, the final decision rested with Exeter city council.

Dan Hicks, a professor of archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, who is helping to repatriate colonial-era items held in private collections, said the decision by Exeter was a reminder that many decisions about restitution lie with local councils and museum trustees, not with national government.

He said: “Landmark decisions like this reveal how items that are subject to restitution claims represent a tiny minority of the UK’s museum collections – that are usually not even on public display but which can hold immense significance and value for claimant communities.”

Rachel Sutton, the council’s portfolio holder for climate and culture, said there was a moral obligation to return the items and that the council recognised that the “original injustices” still reverberated today with First Nation Canadians.

“Giving back Crowfoot’s regalia returns control to the Siksika Nation over their cultural identity, dignity and authority, and is the right thing to do,” she said.

Representatives from the Siksika Nation will visit Exeter once Covid-19 restrictions have lifted, and an official ceremony to hand over the regalia will take place.

The decision highlights the treatment of items held in national museums, such as the V&A, and the British Museum, which cannot return some artefacts because of legal constraints, compared with that shown by non-national museums and institutions, which have more freedom.

In April 2019, Jeremy Wright, the UK’s culture secretary at the time, ruled out returning objects held in national museums, saying that if you “followed the logic of restitution to its logical conclusion”, there would be no “single points where people can see multiple things”.

Following Wright’s comments there have been several pledges to return disputed artefacts held in museums and collections outside the national portfolio.

In November 2019 Manchester Museum became the first UK institution to return ceremonial items to Aboriginal groups nearly a century after they were stolen by British forces. The repatriation of the artefacts was heralded as the beginning of the return of tens of thousands of similar items from institutions across the UK.

Later the same year Jesus College Cambridge announced it was returning a bronze cockerel stolen by British colonial forces during the notorious 1897 “punitive expedition” to Benin city and donated to the college. This followed after a student-led campaign to secure its repatriation.

Hicks added that many local authority and university museums were pioneering approaches that could make normalise restitution, while operating on a case-by-case basis.

“I hope that city councillors across the UK will now pay closer attention to the ‘world culture’ collections for which they are responsible, many of which are subject to restitution claims, whether from north America, Africa, or beyond,” he added.