If there’s one thing Louie Renville remembers about spending summers with his grandparents on the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate reservation in South Dakota, it’s the water.

“No one drank out of the faucet,” he says.

Renville was about 8 years old when he noticed that the water coming out of the tap was sometimes a murky brown—the result of contamination from agricultural runoff. He learned that the water in his home on St. Paul’s East Side was also tinged with what are known as “forever chemicals” from industrial waste disposal practices.

Everyone deserves clean drinking water coming from their own home. ~Louie Renville

Those observations drew Renville to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities to study conservation and resource management and minor in water science.

“Everyone deserves clean drinking water coming from their own home,” he says.

Learning the process

Having grown up as a Gopher fan, watching football and basketball, and touring the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus in St. Paul as a high school freshman, Renville says that the University of Minnesota “seemed like a dream school to me.”

Now entering his fourth year at the Twin Cities campus this fall, Renville has made that dream a reality. He’s taken classes in hydrology and watershed management, environmental policy, and water-quality field methods. The latter class involves touring water facilities to see how water is treated in order to be conserved.

Last summer, he completed an internship with the water reclamation facility for the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (SMSC). The facility treats the water that comes from the hotels and casino, cultural center, clinic, other locally owned buildings, and the homes of some 500-plus enrolled members. It uses chemical filtration to clean the water, Renville explains, which is then returned to the lakes.

“I got to see how things work in the field and be mentored by my coworkers,” he says.

Renville says that receiving a scholarship from the SMSC made his education possible, and that he plans to pursue a master’s degree in water resources after graduating.

Ultimately, he hopes to someday work for his own community in South Dakota. His mission?

“Help get clean drinking water and make rules that stop the contamination. Clean the water and land, restore the wetlands,” he says. “Environmental protection is sacred to me.”

Support students like Louie Renville by giving to a University of Minnesota scholarship.

This story is adapted from M Giving, a publication of the University of Minnesota Foundation