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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to an American Indian jobs center in Minneapolis today carries special (if little-known) resonance with either end of her political career, from the time she arrived in what later became her California congressional district to the recent rightwing taunts she has taken over terrorism.

Pelosi will tour the American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center (AIOIC) with Mayor R.T. Rybak and U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (whose benefit event she’ll also attend). The AIOIC is using more than $100,000 in federal economic-stimulus funds for a youth employment program.

The AIOIC was founded by the Minneapolis-based American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1979. The early years after AIM’s own founding in 1968 had been marked by a series of occupations sparked by a 1969 takeover at Alcatraz Island, site of an abandoned prison in San Francisco Bay.

That was the same year Pelosi moved to San Francisco with her husband Paul, a native of the city. His brother, Ronald Pelosi, had just joined the San Francisco Board of Supervisors after presiding over the city’s planning commission.

The city approved a plan for the private redevelopment of Alcatraz, which had stood vacant for five years since the closing of the federal prison. Within weeks, American Indian students began an occupation of the island, demanding a variety of programs from the federal government as payback for broken treaties.

The occupation of Alcatraz lasted 18 months, but its legacy lasted longer. It inspired nearly 75 other occupations, including the Twin Cities Naval Air Station in 1971 and, most famously, Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1973.

Pelosi’s name has been linked to Alcatraz since January, when President Obama pledged to close the United States’ detention facility for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Conservatives who opposed the closing of Guantanamo saw an opening to jab the speaker and began proposing that prisoners could be transferred from Guantanamo to Alcatraz. Pelosi countered that Alcatraz is now a national park (ABC video), but the Republican razzing that her resistance to the idea represents NIMBYism continues unabated.

Pelosi made another trip to Minnesota last fall to help the campaign of a man some might call Indian: Ashwin Madia, DFL candidate in the state’s Third Congressional District, whose parents emigrated from India.

But a new billboard, pointed out by Minnesota Lawyer Blog, suggests the station perhaps wasn’t so contrite in its apology. In addition to its vaguely racist billboard announcing “We insult you in English” (a reference to the morning show’s past jabs at Somali and Hmong immigrants?), this one seems to boast about the station’s legal bills.

The gag, I guess, is that they need high listenership (and the ad revenue that comes with it) to afford their harried lawyers. But as the Disney-owned station is loaded, my guess is their motives are more cynical. The ad is a bid for more attention from the vocally anti-intellectual, those who tune in just to hear rudeness that, we’re to believe, is quasi-libelous. KQ, in short, wants to keep cashing in on the decline (or sustained bottoming-out) of civility in America. Yee-ha.

Shock jocks invented hot air, and time will tell if the escape of said gas is what we mistook for an apology from KQRS. When we hear an on-air mea culpa, Clyde Bellecourt yukking it up with Tom Barnard some morning, and an announcement about its new roster of native American interns — or a billboard advertising all three — that’ll be the first step toward trusting the station’s sincerity.