Interstate 29 passes on the western side of Pembina, leading north to the Canada–US border at Emerson, Manitoba and south to the cities of Grand Forks and Fargo.

The British/Canadian Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) established a fur-trading post on the site of present-day Pembina in 1797, and it is the oldest European-American community in the Dakotas.

[8] The name Pembina derives from an Ojibwe word for Viburnum edule, a bushy plant with bright red berries which grows in the area.

[10] Nineteenth-century journal-writers and observers translated the word as "summer berry" or "high cranberry".

[11] The Pembina area was historically at the borders of the territories of the Lakota, the Chippewa, and the Assiniboine, American Indian tribes, who competed for hegemony.

Their conflict increased beginning with the French introduction of firearms in the late 17th century as part of their goods traded for furs.

The first known European] visitors to the Pembina region were the French La Vérendrye family in the early 18th century.

European trappers who hunted in the Red River of the North area frequently married Native women and often lived with local tribes at least part of the year.

Their descendants became part of their hunting and trapping culture, and formed the ethnic group recognized in Canada as Métis people.

[citation needed] The settlement was associated with the histories of French Canada, the North West Company (NWC), the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), the Red River Colony, Battle of Seven Oaks, the Red River Rebellion, Assiniboia, and Manitoba.

Through much of the nineteenth century, Métis families used the two-wheeled Red River ox cart trains to travel into the Great Plains, where the men would hunt bison and women would process the meat, skins, and bones.

Due to the unrest among Native Americans of the Red River Valley after the American Civil War, the Minnesota Legislature petitioned Congress to build a fort, especially to defend against incursions by the Lakota (Sioux), some of whom had migrated to Rupert's Land to evade the US Army.

As a result, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock recommended the establishment of the post on December 8, 1869; Fort Pembina was completed on July 8, 1870.

In 1818, with the help of Father Dumoulin, the Roman Catholic Church created a mission in Pembina with the goal of converting buffalo hunters and other Native Americans to Catholicism.

The station was a border blaster primarily targeting Winnipeg from as close to the border as possible; when simultaneous substitution rules took effect in the early 1970s, Canadian interests bought the intellectual property of the station and relocated it to Winnipeg, where it was relicensed by the Canadian government as CKND-TV channel 9, and has operated there ever since.

[citation needed] Motor Coach Industries had planned to close its Pembina factory in late 2022 after moving production to parent company NFI Group's plant in Crookston, Minnesota,[20] but reversed their decision in November 2023.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 0.77 square miles (1.99 km2), all land.