Sultana museum director earns Ph.D.

Sultana museum director earns Ph.D.

Intres, set to take full- time reins of museum in January, received doctorate in Heritage Studies from Arkansas State University

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People thought Louis Intres was crazy when he told them that he was retiring and going back to school to get a master’s degree in history.

After a 38-year career as a banker, he could have retired and lived comfortably.

But he never gave up on his dream of wanting to someday teach history.

“I graduated from Arkansas Teachers College in Conway — which is now UCA — because I wanted to be a teacher,” Intres said.

“But when I graduated I got married and couldn’t find a job teaching. A job came open in banking, so I became a banker. I had a good, successful career. But I still wanted to teach and it allowed me to be able to retire and do this.”

Little did he know that his studies would take him around the world to the Middle East, where he would spend time living in the desert with the Bedouins and culminate with him becoming “Dr.”

Louis Intres.

After almost nine years of research, 336 pages, 652 footnotes, and 225 different sources in the bibliography, Intres recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation at Arkansas State University in Heritage Studies called “Heritage and Identity of Indigenous Peoples: A Comparative Study of American Indians and Bedouins of Jordan.”

Intres researched the illegal digging and looting of Native American artifacts in the Mississippi River Valley and compared them to the smuggling of artifacts in Jordan by the Bedouin tribes and how it has negatively impacted both cultures.

“When you are accepted into the Ph.D. program you are asked by the chair to give them three suggestions that you might be interested in writing about,” Intres said. “I originally wanted to write about the Sultana and the folklore of the Mississippi River, or how baseball held us together in the 20th century as America’s game. But the other thing I wanted to write about was Indian artifact looting in this part of the country.

That’s the one the chair at the time he said he preferred.”

His focus changed completely though after he wrote a masters level essay and gave a talk about the looting of the National Museum of Iraq during the 2003 Gulf War. Over 17,000 ancient artifacts were either destroyed or stolen, most of which have still not been recovered.

The morning after he gave the lecture, Intres received a call from INTERPOL in Washington, D.C. offering him a position as a visiting scholar.

“That’s what led to me visiting the Middle East,” Intres said. “What I discovered over there was that the Bedouins themselves were stealing and looting graves and selling the stuff to survive. It’s called subsistence looting.”

When he mentioned it to the faculty at Arkansas State University, they suggested he incorporate that experience into his research.

“That’s when we decided that my dissertation subject would be a comparative study of indigenous people and how the theft and smuggling of these artifacts was changing their cultural heritage,” Intres said.

His research took him back to Jordan, where he lived among the Bedouins and saw the looting firsthand, to the Quapaw and Osage Indian tribes in Oklahoma and Arkansas, and into government archives in St. Louis and Memphis.

“I went all over Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, southeast Kansas,” Intres said. “And then Jordan, Israel, and Egypt.”

Intres said working on a Ph.D. was both gratifying and extremely frustrating.

There were times when he thought about quitting.

“I was warned up front that there would be times that I would feel like I wanted to quit,” Intres said. “I learned that despite my frustration, that it was a journey, and that you had to be persistent, and that you need to accept the direction and advice and counsel that you get from the people who are helping you along the way. That’s what they are here for — to guide you through the whole process.”

And if it had not been for his wife Shirley, and his family, who were behind him 100 percent, he probably would have quit years ago.

But it was worth every minute of it.

“It was long and arduous,” Intres said. “But Shirley never let me quit. It’s been a true journey and it has been the most enjoyable, exciting thing that I have ever done. I got to meet remarkable people. I got to meet world leaders. I got to work on archaeological sites. I got to climb the great pyramid. I went down into King Tut’s tomb. I floated the Nile with people who were illegally selling artifacts. I traveled the desert on camel. I lived with the Bedouins. I slept on the same sand as Lawrence of Arabia. I was almost killed. And I was adopted as a member of a tribe. So its been one heck of an experience. And I was lucky. I had an excellent committee and excellent advisors in Dr. Erik Gilbert and Dr. Brady Banta at Arkansas State.”

Now that he is Dr. Louis Intres, he’s about to embark on another lifelong passion. Intres was hired by Marion to oversee efforts to build a permanent museum to the steamboat Sultana. With his dissertation finished, he plans to start on the Sultana full time in January.

“I’m extremely excited to work with the city on this,” Intres said. “This is something that with the people of Marion we can build together. The Sultana is Marion’s story, and it is a story that I have loved since I was six years old when I heard all of the tales about the river. So the opportunity to build a museum about this topic is one that I am looking forward to. And I want to thank the people in Marion who were constantly encouraging me to finish my Ph.D. I plan to give the Sultana my full attention now and I am positive the people of Marion will be pleased with the final result.”

By Mark Randall