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Culture is not just dancing, singing and dot paintings. It is collective values and ways of perceiving and thinking about the world. A problem with NAIDOC is the overemphasis on the outwardly manifest - which turns culture into a caricature.
Penny Wong's recent NAIDOC week speech makes it clear to me how clueless Australians are. Because Bruce Pascoe wrote a book presenting our culture as being slightly more "advanced" than was thought - that makes us more worthy of inclusion and less deserving of genocide.
They still measure us to the yardstick of technological "advancement", a yardstick that we will never measure up to because it is not of value to us. They don't understand that we have an entirely different set of underlying values.
If we measure Australian culture with the yardstick of our values - they also will never measure up. Lost people lacking a stable identity, destroyed river systems, poor people left behind, violent nuclear families... ect. fail as much as our technology fails in their eyes.
This is the fundamental problem with political assimilation with the Uluru Statement. They want to ground themselves in our legacy - without even a discussion on how they will incorporate our values. It is a tokenistic transplant of their colonial systems into our legacy.
