A Victorian treaty with Aboriginal people could result in the school curriculum being changed to include a more comprehensive view of Aboriginal history and centres to teach Aboriginal language established throughout the state, if suggestions raised in the first round of consultations are adopted.

The first 10 meetings, conducted in Melbourne and regional towns throughout the state, also advocated for traditional owners to be given hunting rights and access to waterways and sacred sites.

It’s a culturally-focused log of claims that the Aboriginal affairs minister, Natalie Hutchins, said showed that most who had taken part in early consultation meetings were hopeful the treaty process could be made to work in Victoria, but she warned it could take several years for the agreement to be nailed down.

The Andrews government committed to establishing treaty talks in 2015, after a meeting of 500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Melbourne unanimously voted against the national constitutional recognition process.

An interim working group was established in April, and in October the group held the first of a series of community meetings focused on working out the process the treaty negotiations would follow, as well as outlining some key demands.

Six more community meetings, in Echuca, Mildura, Portland, Sale, Wodonga and Melbourne, are scheduled for March, before a two-day summit in Melbourne in April.

A report released by the interim working group on Thursday set out a plan to establish a statewide Aboriginal representative body that would act on behalf of Victoria’s Aboriginal peoples in negotiating a treaty with the state government, in much the same way that a union negotiates with an employer on behalf of the employees.

Hutchins said the government aimed to introduce legislation securing the structure, role, and funding of the representative body before the 2018 election.

“We are being pretty upfront about saying that we want to lock the process in – both through the cabinet and parliamentary processes – so that we are not trying to rush something through by the next election,” she told Guardian Australia.

“We want to make sure that no matter who the next government is, there is some legislation locked in to support the process.”

Hutchins said it was important the representative body had a clear mandate to act on behalf of all Aboriginal Victorians to avoid a situation such as the one seen in Western Australia, where a $1.3bn Indigenous land use agreement between the state government and the Noongar people was ruled invalid by the federal court because some registered native title holders refused to sign the deal.

That case has prompted a review of the Native Title Act.

Taungwurrung man Mick Harding, a member of the working group, said the representative body had to be developed with full community support in order to establish that mandate.

Harding said it could then take years to negotiate a treaty that made reparations for the wrongs done to Aboriginal people in Victoria in the past and would be applicable into the future.

“How does it create equity and equality for our people in this society today, taking into account around 2,000 plus generations of our people, 150 years of things that happened, and present something that’s going to help us be functional human beings in this society, and have our ethics and the cultural things that are important to us?” he said.

Dr Carwyn Jones, a law lecturer from the University of Wellington who has worked on treaty settlements in New Zealand, said treaty negotiations could “reset their relationship” between a country and its Indigenous peoples.

“An important first step is to recognise and acknowledge what’s happened in the past and there does need to be some reparation for that in order for people to renew that relationship in a positive way,” he told Guardian Australia.

“To have a good productive treaty relationship it needs to have addressed the things that have gone wrong in the relationship in the first place and taken some steps to address that.”