It has already been a Joe Salazar week in Colorado, and it’s not over yet.

The firebrand Democratic House representative from Thornton declared his candidacy for attorney general on Friday, saying he would be the people’s lawyer and touting his civil rights background as ideal in the Trump-era when, he said, civil rights and the environment are under attack.

Your likely Democratic primary opponent, Boulder County DA Stan Garnett, “brings a prosecutor’s experience to the job. Why are you better suited?” asked 9 News host Kyle Clark.

“Because I’m a civil rights attorney,” said Salazar. “I’m someone who deals with the Constitution every day, and that’s what we’re going to need to battle against Trump. We’ve had prosecutors in the office of the attorney general and right now we need civil rights attorneys to fight for the people.”

Salazar is rolling out his high-profile Ralph Carr ‘sanctuary state’ bill Thursday with a press event planned to take place at the Capitol just before the bill is scheduled to be heard in the House Judiciary Committee. The event will feature members of ethnic minority immigrant and refugee rights groups and survivors of the abuses of biased public policy of the past.

On Monday, Salazar’s hosting a town hall together with the other eight members of the Colorado Democratic Latino Caucus, including Speaker of the House Crisanta Duran and Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman. The town hall will include guests from the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition and the Colorado Hispanic Bar Association.

This past Monday, Salazar led debate in the House on a resolution to approve a memorial sculpture that will pay tribute to the Indian victims – mostly women and children – of the 1864 Sand Creek massacre on Colorado’s eastern plains.

“There’s been an awful lot of discussion about what ‘historic trauma’ means,” he said on the floor of the House.

It was a very Salazar approach to the debate. He intended to turn the discussion up a notch by introducing the kind of abstract term that was all but guaranteed to make some of his colleagues in the House squirm, prepping for a lecture they were sure was based in the curricula of the ‘politically correct.’

“People say, ‘Well, why can’t you just get over things that have happened a hundred and fifty years ago?'” Salazar said. “How the American-Indian community describes it is that ‘Yes that massacre happened over a hundred and fifty years ago, but the atrocities are continuing every single day.’

“The removal of people from their historic homelands is historic trauma. Being placed under government rule is historic trauma. And since the Sand Creek massacre occurred, we’ve had children removed from families, which is historic trauma. My own great grandmother was removed from her tribe, and our family suffers from historic trauma, because an entire culture was removed when that child was removed. My best friend, my childhood friend who is Navajo, his parents were sent to boarding school, and let’s not forget what happened at the boarding schools, physical and sexual abuse to indigenous children in an attempt to wipe out their culture. That’s historic trauma.

“So when we talk about the Sand Creek massacre, we can’t talk about it in a vacuum… We have to talk about it in a holistic sense, about what happened afterward.

“We should never forget the massacre because otherwise we’re doomed to repeat it. I support Senate Joint Resolution 16 because on a personal level, I understand it. Just on a personal level, I get why the Native American community doesn’t ever want to forget.”

We’re living a Joe Salazar week in Colorado politics.

– john@coloradostatesman.com