Pembina Band of Chippewa Indians (Ojibwe: Aniibiminani-ziibiwininiwag) are a historical band of Chippewa (Ojibwe), originally living along the Red River of the North and its tributaries. Through the treaty process with the United States, the Pembina Band were settled on reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota. Some tribal members refusing settlement in North Dakota relocated northward and westward, some eventually settling in Montana.
The successors apparent of the Pembina Band are:
The Little Shell Pembina Band of North America, based in North Dakota, in the 1990s came under the domination of is a militia-type group. Although of limited numbers, it has actively traced its genetic lineage to Chief Little Shell, who consummated a treaty with the United States government in 1863 and with a group of warriors who resisted a later treaty in 1893 and moved off the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota that was confirmed by that treaty. By 2005, the band recognized that it had been duped by a white militia leader who had promised them independence from the United States and recognition as a sovereign nation with no obligation to pay taxes, and with the right to issue its own licenses and to establish its own insurance company, the effect of which was not leave the band with no income as the militia group (and one Indonesian who attempted a coup against the government of Fiji) used bank accounts in the name of the band to convert the cash received from people throughout the US who were sold memberships in the band so that they could avoid taxes and who then bought fraudulent insurance policies issued using the name of the band. The band was receptive to the objectives put forward by the militia group because Little Shell had resisted the 1893 treaty with the US government that he felt was entered into by a renegade group of members of his band that had been co-opted by the US Government into signing the treaty. The North Dakota band was recognized as a successor to the Little Shell band in a Court of Claims decision in 1973 that decided that the 1893 treaty had been little more than a theft of Indian lands. The band was thereafter outmaneuvered in Congress to obtain the benefit of tribal moneys by the Turtle Mountain band, who also claimed to be descendants of the Little Shell band even though Little Shell broke away from them in 1893 and lived apart with other warriors until his death in 1906. The lineage of the group has been documented by a leading scholar at North Dakota Statue University in Grand Forks. Because the tribal chief has a hereditary tradition, the band has been mistakenly identified with only one family, Due to its checkered history in the 1990s, it is not currently recognized as a Native American tribe by the US federal government nor by North Dakota.