Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant

How American is Miss America? For Susan Supernaw, a Muscogee (Creek) and Munsee Native American, the question wasn't just academic. Throughout a childhood clouded by poverty, alcoholism, and abuse, Supernaw sought escape in school and dance and the Native American Church. She became a presidential scholar, won a scholarship to college, and was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1971. Supernaw might not have won the Miss America pageant that year, but she did call attention to the Native peoples living largely invisible lives throughout their own American land. And she did at long last earn her Native American name.

Chronicling a quest to escape poverty and find meaning, Supernaw's story is revealing, humorous, and deeply moving. Muscogee Daughter is the story of finding a Native American identity among the distractions and difficulties of American life and of discerning an identity among competing notions of what it is to be a woman, a Native American, and a citizen of the world.

Susan Supernaw is a computer software, education, and technology consultant. Her manuscript for this book won the First Book Award for Prose from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas under the title "The Power of a Name." Geary Hobson is a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and the author of, most recently, The Last of the Ofos.