Stephen Page has worked as the artistic director of Sydney's Bangarra Dance Theatre for 27 years.
He said Indigenous Australians owe much to the "contemporary warriors" who fought to have Indigenous people recognised in the 1967 referendum.
But 50 years on, he told SBS World News he's frustrated that despite frequent conversations, there's still no change on constitutional recognition.
"Why are we treating it like a cup of coffee?" he asked.
"The constant constitutional question, and how it's not acknowledged, how it's not respected, there must be a better way to compensate land and people."
Growing up in Brisbane, he's a descendant of the Nunukul people and the Munaldjali clan of the Yugambeh Nation.
Page: "The constant constitutional question, and how it's not acknowledged, how it's not respected, there must be a better way to compensate land and people." Source: SBS World News
As a young boy, he was suspended from school for questioning why he wasn't taught Indigenous history.
The third youngest of 12 siblings, Page said his ambition was simply to survive.
"You don't usually check in everyday and say, 'what are my ambitions?'," he said.
"I think you just spend most of the time in a big family surviving, waking up every day and wondering if you're going to get some food on the table."
That all changed after high school, when he came across a poster advertising careers in dance.
"At first I just couldn't believe that there was actually a place that you could go and you could reconnect to your culture, your traditional song and dance," Page said.
Since then, Page's life has been fully immersed in performing arts.
He choreographed Australian feature films Bran Nue Dae and The Sapphires, worked as Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 2004 and wrote, directed and choreographed countless live performances - including the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Stephen Page at Bangarra Dance Theatre.
"When you get to the Olympics in 2000, I'd only been 10 years in the company," he said.
"That just really empowered me and made me more of an obsessive Indigenous person like you wouldn't believe."
Page called his art form a medicine, one that healed him, reconnected him with his culture and lifted his spirit.
"I just love the fact that I work in a world where that expression is a medicine. That expression is healing. That expression puts good spirit in you."
