OPINION: Although the Black Lives Matter protests have been far more vociferous in the US than here, and more statues have been pulled down, New Zealanders are increasingly aware of the arguments about our colonial heritage.

As I watched images of the Hamilton statue being removed by the council after repeated requests by iwi, and I read that the name of the city may be a shared Hamilton/Kirikiriroa, I smugly thought to myself how lucky I was not to have oppressive, colonial skeletons in my Pkeh closet.

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A defaced statue of Sir George Grey in Albert Park, Auckland. One of Dave Armstrong's tpuna was fired by Governor Grey as Protector of the Aborigines because he was too liberal.

You see, I have a perfect whakapapa of liberal and considerate colonial settlers who did nothing but work hard and help the locals. My ancestors didnt come here, like Captain Cook did, and kill Mori. I am no relation to Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his cronies in the New Zealand Company who cajoled and tricked their way into providing masses of land to colonial settlers in Wellington and the Hutt Valley.

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There are no relatives in my whakapapa of the dastardly Governor Grey, who invaded the Waikato to 'protect' Pkh Aucklanders in a massive deceptive land grab that made Blair and Bushs 'weapons of mass destruction' pale into insignificance. Even better, one of my tpuna was fired by Governor Grey as Protector of the Aborigines because he was too liberal.

Yes, despite being 100% Pkeh, I am 100% pure. There are no colonising white supremacist skeletons in my closet. I am descended from George Clarke, a kind Anglican missionary who built the biggest farm, at the time, in New Zealand in the Far North. He built a wonderful Mission House at Waimate North and was on good terms with many locals, including Hongi Hika (whom he called 'Shongi').

George even unsuccessfully tried to stop Shongi from raiding iwi further down the island. The great man Charles Darwin visited Waimate in 1831 and wrote about it in Voyage of the Beagle. 'At Waimate there are three large houses, where the missionary gentlemen, Messrs. Williams, Davies, and Clarke, reside.'

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Dave Armstrong: ''My ancestors didnt come here, like Captain Cook did, and kill Mori.''

Darwin didnt think much of New Zealand but he liked my tpunas farm. 'I look back but to one bright spot, and that is Waimate, with its Christian inhabitants.''

The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography even said that 'unlike most of his compatriots in New Zealand, George Clarke had a genuine sympathy for the Mori people''. Yay! OK, that entry was probably written by a Pkh with heaps of unconscious bias, but not bad. If there was a statue of Clarke next to Cook or Grey or Picton or Wakefield or Hamilton, youd definitely take them out first.

But recently I wanted to check the meaning of the Mori word mtau. The excellent online dictionary I use always gives a definition followed by a sentence in Mori using the word. Mtau means clever or knowledgeable and the following sentence gave context.

'He tangata mtau ki te waihanga p a Hri Karaka'. 'George Clarke was a knowledgeable person at making guns'. What the flintlock? A gunsmith?

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Dave Armstrong frets about the role his ancestors played in the colonisation of New Zealand.

Funny how Dad, who was so proud of his one notable ancestor in among the gambling addicts and fraudsters, never told us that our tpuna had this particular talent. But surely Hri only made guns for good people?

When the Imperial Forces tried to storm Pene Tauis P at Ohaeawai, just a musket shot away from Waimate North, George Clarkes son in a fit of conscious bias worked as an interpreter for the British. But surely Hri Karaka would have told his fellow Brits to get lost if they wanted him to fix a couple of muskets for the assault in a hurry? Yeah right.

OK, so maybe Im not quite as 100% pure as I thought. But a further examination of my whakapapa on my mothers side finds some good hearty Scandinavian immigrants. No gunsmiths, no land grabbers, just a dedicated bunch of Scandis in the Wairarapa helping to chop down one of the largest stands of native forest in the country when they werent making patchwork quilts. If you cant find a huia today, you can partly thank them.

As a progressive liberal, I fretfully sleep and fitfully dream about the role my ancestors played in the colonisation of New Zealand. Yet Im still not sure where I stand on the statue issue.

But I do know that most of the people who say, 'its just history, we shouldnt change it' are the same ones who have resisted commemorating the New Zealand Wars and teaching our history in schools.

The Its just history crowd love commemorating Gallipoli and buying into its 'birth of the nation' myth while refusing to accept that the battle sites of rkau, Gate P, Ruapekapeka and countless others are just as worthy of study.

Whether you want to pull statues down or leave them standing is up to you. In the meantime, to try to improve our mtauranga about our colonial history, to understand how and why it happened, is possibly the best thing we could do.

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How my colonial smugness evaporated with one explosive revelation - Stuff.co.nz