He’s done it again.

The prime minister’s so-called special envoy for Indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott, just can’t seem to stop deliberately trolling Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the progressive supporters of their compromised rights.

Abbott long ago reduced himself to a joke as the self-declared prime minister for Indigenous Australia, adopting the top-down approach of the mission manager of old in his dealings with Aboriginal communities and leaders.

Who can forget his comments that: Aboriginal people in remote communities were simply exercising “lifestyle choices”; Australia was “unsettled or, um, scarcely settled” in 1788 and that the first fleet’s arrival was, despite 60,000 years of enduring Indigenous civilisation, this continent’s defining moment?

Abbott, a former prime minister with a lust for reinstatement that knows no boundaries of realpolitik or ideology, now seems to lament that Christian prayer should have as great a role in public ceremonies as Indigenous welcome to country ceremonies.

At the launch of a book titled How Political Correctness is Destroying Education and Your Child’s Future (yawn) Abbott seemed to bemoan that recognition of Indigenous culture and history was somehow edging out Christian religious values from the public cultural space (a theme, it seems, of the book he was launching too).

Part of me, like every Indigenous person I know and like the overwhelming majority of prominent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders, wants to ignore the pronouncements Abbott makes in the “let’s-give-him-something-to-do-with-blackfellas-just-to-stop-him-from-undermining-me-too”–role that accidental PM Scott Morrison afforded him.

It would be generous to say that religious mission experiences for Indigenous Australians were mixed

But it’s best to combat prejudice (or is it just plain wilful ignorance, or opportunistic, look-at-me–style trolling?) with light, and harmful, politically indulgent hyperbole with reason.

To that end I’d recommend the member for Warringah have a read of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which explains the sophistication of Indigenous civilisation and profound connection to land – country – with all its related spiritual and physical consequences of dispossession. Then he might try Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth, the remarkable story of millennia of pre-invasion continental land management, to better understand the importance of acknowledging Indigenous connection to country.

Or he might like to consider rolling up the sleeves and checking out the papers and photographs of anthropologist Donald Thomson, not least relating to his visit to the Presbyterian Aurukun mission in 1932 where he witnessed immense physical and emotional cruelty to the Aboriginal residents. There is a chilling photograph of Aboriginal men and women non-conformists being marched away to permanent banishment on Palm Island, the males chained at their necks.

It would be generous to say that religious mission experiences for Indigenous Australians were mixed. While various missionaries were capable of acts of kindness, there was extreme physical (including sexual), emotional and psychological cruelty. From the early 20th century the abiding mission philosophy – regardless of denomination – was the “taming” of Indigenous instinct and custom, the sublimation of traditional culture to Christianity.

It is instructive that Abbott has seen fit, in the context of setting up some politically convenient, straw-man cultural clash of civilisations between acknowledgment of Indigenous country and culture and Christian prayer, to point out that western society was based on all people being created equal, and justice was built on the biblical principle, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.

How did that translate on this continent? Or elsewhere in the empire?

It pays to remember that the Christian invader-occupiers soon set about the systematic dispossession of Indigenous people from their traditional lands through a process of wholesale murder with cold steel and cordite, poison and dogs.

Of course it remains a remarkable testimony to the complexity of Australian Indigenous spirituality and to the immense human generosity of ATSI communities and personal faith, that many Aboriginal people still embrace Christianity as part of a deep, multi-layered belief system that, in many cases, also incorporates Islam and the creationist, totemic animals.

As a very old, now passed, Yolngu lady told me a few years ago, “God was there in the beginning and we always believed in the spirit. God the creator was always there and is there in the songlines and in the stories of the land. And he has been reintroduced to us again through the missions. It is not complicated for us.”

And she urged me to remember that Islam was part of the same story of faith and belief, too.

Abbott spoke of a public event he attended where, “Every single speaker, and there was about six of them, acknowledged country. But there was not a single prayer, even though our society is unimaginable without the influence of Christianity.”

There is a hard-fought reason why public ceremony across this country has come to involve acknowledgments of – and welcomes to - country. And this is quite simply because Indigenous sovereignty has never been ceded to the Christian invaders and all those who came to make the settler state.

The acknowledgments are usually short, often pro-forma and too rarely go to questions of justice or restitution – or to what actually happened.

Indeed, I’d argue they never go far enough after acknowledging the elders past and present, and the fact that we are on Indigenous land – “always was, always will be”.

For the next step should be, “ ... this land that was stolen from its Indigenous custodians through a process of dispossession and murder”.

The special envoy for Indigenous affairs might want more public prayer.

But Indigenous Australia just wants and deserves more public truth-telling.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist