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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.