As such, they and their descendants were listed as Freedmen on the Dawes Rolls, by which they were entitled to land allotments under the Treaty of 1866 made by the United States with the Five Civilized Tribes.

John Rector's mother Mollie McQueen was enslaved by the Muscogee Opothleyahola, who fought in the Seminole Wars and split with the tribe, moving his followers to Kansas.

The family lived simply but not in poverty; however, the $30 (equivalent to $1,000 in 2023) annual property tax on Sarah's parcel was such a burden that her father petitioned the Muskogee County Court to sell the land.

[15] Thus, as soon as Sarah began to receive this windfall, there was pressure to change her guardianship from her parents to a local white resident and family acquaintance named T.J. (or J.T.)

[14] Due to her wealth, in 1913, the Oklahoma Legislature made an effort to have her declared an honorary white, allowing her the benefits of elevated social standing, such as riding in a first-class car on the trains.

[7] In June 1914, a special agent for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), James C. Waters Jr., sent a memo to Du Bois regarding her situation.

[21] This allotment would soon prove highly profitable, resulting in Rector becoming known as "'The Richest Colored Girl in the World'" because of the royalties she collected from the Prairie Oil and Gas Company.

"[23] Sarah Rector's story has been highlighted for numerous reasons – as a post-Civil War symbol of the Black wealth that resulted in the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the destruction of "'Black Wall Street'", as another example of racially driven abuse of power by the U.S. federal government.

[22] However, this article attempts to illuminate this narrative as an extension of Boxell's work to reveal how Rector's life can also be interpreted as an example of how the abuse and commodification of Native land can be viewed as a contemporary form of cultural genocide.

In God's Red Son, Warren presents this image in which land was valued for its crop production and thus could "pay for a new stove or some ready-made clothing from the Sears Roebuck catalog.

"[24] Through this description, it becomes evident that land itself was consumed, becoming both a product and victim of the Second Industrial Revolution and Westward Expansion, the latter of which directed the financial abuse to which Rector was subject.

[25] This notion is substantiated further by Ostler's article, "'To Extirpate the Indians': An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes" – which describes how the United States Government encroached upon and stole Native land, again in the context of an earlier century – setting this precedent for the ways in which the abuse of Sarah Rector's land allotment could be viewed as an example of cultural genocide.

As highlighted in Smithers Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal and Sovereignty in Native America, this patriarchal power structure was created and enforced by the U.S. Government, further revealing how Sarah Rector can be viewed as a symbol of the pervasive cultural genocide of Indigenous communities, especially as the abusive practices of oil culture by the U.S. Government and white America hold true in the present day.