(Transcript from World News Australia Radio)
They say cultural insensitivity, among the many other wrongs and abuses, has caused particular pain over the years, decades and centuries.
Government agencies admit to this as well.
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But as Darren Mara reports, there's a renewed effort to bridge this divide and a new understanding that cultural competency is key to addressing Indigenous disadvantage.
Power differences, Indigenous inequality and cultural misunderstanding.
These are some of the themes in the song written by Indigenous sisters Natasha and Fiona Taylor and performed by the band at the Indigenous Education Centre at the Kangan Institute in Victoria.
Linc Yow Yeh, a Murri man originally from Queensland, manages the Education Centre.
He says the song the Taylor sisters called "Newsflash" tries to explain some things about issues that matter to Indigenous people.
"Through a song is a nice easy way of alerting people that there are differences and there are things there that the wider public in Australia don't realise or haven't been educated (about). So it's a re-educational process."
The federally-funded song has been used by some Indigenous groups around Australia to promote awareness of Aboriginal cultures and concerns.
Many who work in the field say it's been a lack of cultural competency, particularly by government welfare agencies and NGOs, that's caused much tension and anger in Aboriginal communities over the years.
Linc Yow Yeh says the wounds caused by past misdeeds will take much longer heal, but some things are changing for the better.
"A lot more organisations today, 2013, and probably for the last three or so years, have really been going to the table wanting more education around Indigenous issues, around Indigenous education, around our perspectives on the country itself and our perspectives on culture. Every Indigenous person in the country is coming from that ancestry of the oldest living human community on the planet. So how do we get this message across? How do we talk this through? How do you put sixty-thousand-plus years into cultural awareness training?"
State and territory governments have programs which attempt to bridge this cultural divide.
But until now most have had only limited success.
Many Aboriginal people still suffer when it comes to life expectancy, infant mortality, early childhood development issues, education and unemployment.
One thing that's now agreed on is the importance of the manner in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are engaged, not just setting up programs and hoping they can bring change.
So what are the requirements of cultural competency?
Amanda Nissen has almost 30 years' experience working with Aboriginal people.
"It's an incredibly complex area and you'll never know, you'll never truly know everything. It's dependent on the region in which you work, it depends on the level of education that you're working with as well. If you go to the more traditional lands, the more remote communities. There's been many years of history where there's been a lot of distrust that's been built up so you generally have to wait a period of time before that trust can be renewed, so you must go very gently."
More than 10 years ago, Amanda Nissen and helped set up the Indigenous Support Services consultancy, which develops processes for engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities for government agencies and NGOs.
She says "respectful engagement" is the key.
"So for example if we were looking at a mining company who were dealing with native title claimant groups then they would use a protocol and approach the local elders to start negotiations so in each area you would find particular groups that are established and you would approach those groups and ask who the most appropriate people would be to pull around the table to commence negotiations."
Ms Nissen says decision-making processes in Indigenous communities are often lengthy and can be inexpedient.
She says this is particularly important for large corporations when negotiating with Aboriginal traditional land owners.
"Their decision-making process is very different. They don't make decisions on the spot. The elders with whom you're involved in discussions would then want to take it back to their community and it could take lengthy periods of time before they would be able to come back around the table and feedback what the community was saying because part of their process is to make sure that it's not a decision that they're making alone, that they do involve all of their family groups."
Ms Nissen says it's also important to understand many Indigenous communities have their own problem-solving mechanisms.
She refers to what's known as family feuding, when different Aboriginal groups or families are divided over an issue.
That division, Ms Nissen says, can sometimes lead to community violence.
She says the challenge is to not be drawn into the feud.
"Staying neutral in that is very important, not to take sides at all, but always come back to 'what is the purpose? Why are we here?' and not get involved in any of the politics at all."
But simply being able to communicate is also key to cultural competency.
One challenge in some remote and very remote Aboriginal communities is the uniqueness of the languages spoken in the area.
The latest Census found 13 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 15 years and over speak a language other than English as their main language at home, and that increases to almost half in remote areas.
Many Indigenous people in remote communities experience difficulties both communicating in English and being understood by English speakers.
This is now an area of focus for many federal, state and territory government agencies.
Jacqueline McGowan-Jones is the executive director of Aboriginal Engagement and Coordination for the West Australian Department for Child Protection.
Her grandmother was a Wathaurong woman from Victoria and her grandfather an Arrernte man from around Alice Springs.
Ms McGowan-Jones says it's a big challenge to provide culturally sensitive services to people for whom English may be a second, third or even fourth language.
"In the Kimberley we use and access interpreters through the various language centres and the Kimberley Interpreters Service when we need to. In many of our other remote locations what we do is work very closely with members of the family or extended family and community who can help us with those barriers."
Ms McGowan-Jones says it's also important to understand the added importance that other family members like uncles, aunts and grandparents play in Indigenous communities.
She says though there are still much deeper, more personal matters to consider when aspiring to cultural competentcy.
And she says resentment still resides in the hearts and minds of many Aboriginal people over past practices adopted by welfare agencies.
"I'm not going to pretend that we've gotten past mistrust. Aboriginal people have a very healthy mistrust of welfare and all government agencies and it's evident in everything we do. However, it is the role of all staff in our deparment to be able to work collaboratively with Aboriginal children, families and communities, to break down those barriers and build a new paradigm of contact for them. We musn't perpetuate the practices of the past."
Maree Walk is the chief executive of Community Services at the New South Wales Department of Community Services.
She says about 10 per cent of the department's case workers are Aboriginal - and they're crucial in providing culturally-appropriate services.
"So one of our challenges is to really get the involvement of them sometimes across a wide range of cases because they're often able to provide really good advice to our non-Aboriginal staff about how to work with families. So one of the ones is to ensure we really use this really precious resource of Aboriginal case workers and their input in terms of designing and working out how you're going to intervene and how you're going to involve families."
Linc Yow Yeh from the Indigenous Education Centre in Victoria says if Indigenous culture is regarded as alive and respected, cultural sensitivity and competency will flow from that.
And he says only then can mistrust and misunderstanding be truly addressed.
"Even going back a step further, prior to the information and content about our culture is about that awareness of it and that it is an existing culture, it is a living culture, it is still well and alive at the moment and although there's a great deal of our cultures across the country that have been removed from people and smashed and desecrated and massacred, it's not lost. And I don't use that term and that's part of the vernacular we talk about in our cultural awareness training, is not to use terminology like lost because our mob has never lost anything. It's about the removal and the power being shifted. They've been taken away by the oppressor."
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