Stephen Hagan accepted the award at a ceremony in Cairns in north Queensland, at the end of the annual national NAIDOC Week.
He became well-known for his unsuccessful campaign to have the "Nigger" from the E-S "Nigger" Brown stand at main oval in Toowoomba removed, because he believed it was racist.
The stand was named in the 1960s after the late Edward Stanley Brown, an international rugby league player of Anglo-Saxon descent.
After releasing two books Mr Hagan says he's already started work on his next book on racism in religion.
“I'm absolutely thrilled that the national bodies were fit to bestow on me the award of the Indigenous person of the year. The reason I think I gained the respect of my peers around the country is because I have been fairly resilient, had a lot of failures in the court systems, I've highlighted the problems with racism in this country and wrote a book ‘One Man Stand’.”