{"id":12639,"date":"2017-05-10T18:11:53","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T22:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/?p=12639"},"modified":"2023-03-16T15:24:26","modified_gmt":"2023-03-16T19:24:26","slug":"the-golden-hill-paugussett-tribe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/south-end\/the-golden-hill-paugussett-tribe\/","title":{"rendered":"The Golden Hill Paugussett Tribe"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Charles Brilvitch<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Golden Hill Paugussett tribe has been a part of Greater Bridgeport\u2019s history from time immemorial.\u00a0 The original indigenous people of this region, who greeted the first European explorers and settlers and who were responsible for the pottery fragments, arrowheads, and shell middens excavated by archaeologists over the years, still manage to hold onto a tiny scrap of their ancestral territory, the Golden Hill Reservation in Trumbull.\u00a0 Their story is a fascinating one, sometimes tragic, more often inspirational.<\/p>\n

It all goes back to the land.\u00a0 Scholars and historians generally agree that Paugussett territory extended along the Connecticut coast west from New Haven Harbor to the Saugatuck River in Westport, and to the upper reaches of the Housatonic and Naugatuck Rivers.\u00a0 This is a unique geological province of Connecticut: It is the only portion of the state with a wide and fertile coastal plain, much like lands well to the south (to the east of New Haven and from Norwalk west the boulder-strewn granite hills extend down to the edge of the Sound).\u00a0 The Paugussett lands had long sandy beaches adjoined by extensive tidal flats and salt marshes, quite the opposite of the \u201crock-bound coast\u201d usually associated with New England.<\/p>\n

This gentle land was a paradise for fish, shellfish, and wildlife as well as Native people.\u00a0 It is estimated that then, as now, fully 25 per cent of Connecticut\u2019s oyster population could be found at the mouth of the Housatonic River–and the area immediately off the coast of Bridgeport comprises the largest natural-growth oyster bed to the north of Chesapeake Bay. The Great Meadows salt marsh of Stratford, in pre-landfill days more than triple its current size, was a major marine nursery of Long Island Sound.\u00a0 Its waters were rife with crabs and terrapin and sheltered immense flocks of waterfowl as well as the fry of dozens of species of fish.\u00a0 The sand flats exposed off the beaches at low tide provided seemingly endless quantities of clams, on which the Indians would feast and often dry for winter use.\u00a0 The Housatonic itself was the southernmost river on the North American continent with a run of Atlantic salmon, which came every year on the heels of the run of shad, also smoked and dried to provide sustenance throughout the year.<\/p>\n

The Paugussett tribesmen nurtured the terrestrial component of this coastline as well.\u00a0 They used fire as a tool to clear underbrush, add fertility to the soil, and provide optimal conditions for game animal habitat.\u00a0 They also cleared substantial areas to create major planting fields–indeed, the contact-era name for what is now Bridgeport, \u201cPequonnock,\u201d means \u201ccleared land.\u201d\u00a0 Indian women were responsible for cultivating the proverbial \u201cThree Sisters\u201d–corn, beans, and squash–as well as other crops ranging from tobacco for ceremonial use to Jerusalem artichokes to be baked, boiled, or fried in the manner of potatoes.<\/p>\n

It has been said that, of all the areas of North America, population density was the greatest in those pre-contact times around the periphery of Long Island Sound.\u00a0 And on the Sound, the population was far and away the greatest in the favored territory that would later be known as Bridgeport and Stratford.\u00a0 All those clams and oysters right offshore provided a protein source for a great multitude of people that required very little labor to gather (bereft of good knives, the Natives would roast them by their fires to extricate them from their shells).\u00a0 The planting fields that had been cultivated and enriched for centuries were known to be of such extent that a population of several thousand could have been supported in comfort and plenty.\u00a0 We know of major Paugussett village locations in the vicinity of Mountain Grove Cemetery, where the fresh water of the Rooster River pours into the saline Ash Creek; on the south side of Golden Hill where Elm Street would later be laid out; and at the head of Johnson\u2019s Creek at the Stratford line (the so-called Johnson Oak nearby, which was estimated to have been 800 to 1000 years old when it succumbed in the 1970s, indicated by its horizontal branch structure that it had always grown in an open field).<\/p>\n

For perhaps thousands of years the Natives lived in harmony with the land, understanding every facet of its character.\u00a0 We are told they held sacred an unusual series of springs that gushed from the earth at the summit of Golden Hill, what geologists of the present time tell us is the outlet of an underground river that comes down from New Milford.\u00a0 Here were found scores of graves over the course of the 19th<\/sup> and early-20th centuries.\u00a0 Orcutt\u2019s History also tells of a \u201cPow-Wow or Medicine Camp,\u201d a circle of stone posts at the foot of Old Mill Hill overlooking Yellow Mill Pond.\u00a0 Although thoughtlessly demolished and used for landfill in the 1840s, a few tantalizing components were preserved as \u201ccuriosities\u201d and survive to the present day.<\/p>\n

As we know all too well, this Arcadian wonderland came to an abrupt end.\u00a0 Europeans began to explore the coast in the 16th<\/sup> century, transmitting deadly diseases that spread from tribe to tribe for which the Natives had no resistance.\u00a0 In 1614 Dutch traders set up shop on the Hudson River, a mere 50 miles from Paugussett territory.\u00a0 Within a short time they managed to coerce the tribe into intensive manufacture of wampum, a product of the quahog shells found in profusion in the waters off the beaches of Fairfield, Milford, and Bridgeport. Used by Natives for millenia for religious and diplomatic purposes, the wampum belts became perverted into a form of currency that was used in the fur trade centered at Albany.\u00a0 The peaceful Paugussetts, whose few primitive weapons were useless against the firearms possessed by the Dutch, were in no position to refuse.<\/p>\n

Worse was to come.\u00a0 A group of religious idealists, under pressure to conform in their native land, decided instead in the 1620s to emigrate en masse and establish a \u201cNew England\u201d on the opposite side of the Atlantic, as if it were some vacant territory free for the taking.\u00a0 They swarmed into Massachusetts, its Indian population heavily decimated by a series of epidemics, and made the surviving Natives exiles in the land their ancestors had occupied for thousands of years.\u00a0 Bemoaning the religious persecution they had suffered in Europe, these \u201cPuritans\u201d forced the Natives to accept their narrow vision of divine worship or face death or a lifetime of enslavement. But, alas for the poor \u201cPraying Indians\u201d who tried to accommodate the ruthless intruders–they ended up being sold off into slavery in the West Indies anyway.<\/p>\n

It would not be long before the choice lands that were home to the Golden Hill Paugussett caught the eye of the land-hungry Englishmen.\u00a0 Led by their clergymen, Puritan \u201cflocks\u201d helped themselves to the rich farmland of the Connecticut River Valley–the product of countless generations of toil on the part of the River Indians–beginning in 1633.\u00a0 The docile River tribes folded before the English, but another more warlike tribe–the Pequots–stood their ground and contested the Puritan incursion into Indian territory.\u00a0 Their resistance led to the Pequot War of 1637, in which the majority of the tribe regardless of age, gender, or history of taking up arms against the English, were murdered in their sleep, and much of the remainder found themselves enslaved, some thousands of miles from home.<\/p>\n

A tattered remnant of the Pequot tribe fled overland, hoping to hook up with kinsmen in the Hudson Valley.\u00a0 They covered 80 grueling miles on foot before they were cornered by the English in a swamp in what is today known as Southport (between Center Street and Oxford Road, just to the north of the I-95 entrance ramp). Here most of the remaining warriors were slaughtered, although the Pequot chief Sassacus did manage to escape one last time (he attained his goal of reaching his Mohawk brethren; they, however, betrayed him, and sent his severed head on a pike to the English at Hartford).<\/p>\n

With the Pequot tribe vanquished, the Englishmen took a good calculating look at the land in the vicinity of their battlefield and liked what they saw–lots of level, fertile land already cleared and ready to farm, plenty of salt hay for their cattle in the marshes, and all those fish and oysters.\u00a0 It mattered little that the land was already \u201cowned\u201d and fully occupied, or that it had previously been claimed by the Dutch.\u00a0 Accordingly, two years later three new settlements were planted–Milford, Stratford, and Fairfield–right in the middle of the Paugussett heartland.\u00a0 As had been the practice elsewhere, the Indian inhabitants would simply have to be elbowed aside from their own country.<\/p>\n

A year earlier (1638), the founders of the New Haven colony had struck upon a new and novel concept: the Indian reservation.\u00a0 The idea was to round up the Native leadership, gift them with a couple of iron kettles, a few bolts of cloth, and some assorted trinkets, and get them to in some fashion sign a legal document written in squiggles in an indecipherable foreign tongue that represented a concept that was inconceivable to the Native mind.\u00a0 \u201cWe the undersigned do hereby sell, bargain, and relinquish all right and title to the lands herein described\u2026.\u201d\u00a0 The legal formalities over and proper title established, the Indians found themselves banished for all time to a tiny scrap of land, ideally a rock pile, that could in no way sustain life for the tribe.\u00a0 It then came down to a choice between starvation, running afoul of the strange English laws, which usually resulted in being sold into slavery or even execution, or exile from the land of the ancestors.<\/p>\n

The New Haven innovation was a boon to the settlers of the Paugussett territories.\u00a0 Schenck\u2019s History tells us that a de facto Paugussett reservation was set up in that year of 1639, its boundaries somewhat vague other than being to the west of Stratford and to the east of Fairfield.\u00a0 With the protein-rich estuary of the Pequonnock, the Great Planting Field, and the sacred precincts of Golden Hill still under their control, the Indians probably thought they could accommodate the invaders and live out their lives in peace.\u00a0 Any such optimism, however, was to be short-lived.<\/p>\n

In 1659 the General Court met at Hartford to establish set boundaries that comprised barely half of Golden Hill itself, on which to supposedly sustain several hundred inhabitants. \u00a0(The bounds of this tract were roughly Catherine Street\/East Washington Avenue on the north; Harral Avenue to Harrison Street on the west; Fairfield Avenue to Golden Hill Street on the south, and the Pequonnock River on the east).\u00a0 In 1680 the Town of Stratford cavalierly laid out the present Washington Avenue right through the middle of the reservation lands, severing the western portion and reducing the tribal allotment to a mere 80 acres. An unwritten policy of harassment was apparently in practice over the years.\u00a0 White farmers would help themselves to the firewood the Indians desperately needed and would let their cattle graze in their cornfields.\u00a0 They gradually encroached on tribal lands so that by the 1760s only eight of those precious few 80 acres remained under Indian control.\u00a0 The tribe filed formal complaint with the General Court in Hartford but failed to obtain justice.<\/p>\n

After the Revolutionary War the Golden Hill Indians thought they had found a champion in the man Aaron Hawley, whose lands adjoined theirs.\u00a0 He demanded redress from the new State of Connecticut on their behalf and was named official overseer of their legal and financial affairs. His motives became clear, however, in 1802, when he asked for and received permission to sell off the last of the Golden Hill reservation to satisfy the debt for legal representation that he himself had incurred.\u00a0 Hawley was paid in full, but the \u201clast\u201d of the Golden Hill Indians were left homeless to fend for themselves.<\/p>\n

This is the point in time at which nineteenth-century historians lose interest in the saga of the Golden Hill Paugussetts, usually adding a vague footnote that they somehow \u201cmelted away\u201d before a \u201cbetter race.\u201d\u00a0 Occasionally they note that a tribal overseer–they were continually appointed by the State throughout the 19th<\/sup> century–procured a new 19 1\/2-acre reservation in the town of Trumbull for the tribe\u2019s use in 1841.\u00a0 But the condescending concept of the tribe \u201cmelting away\u201d so that the historian could turn his attention to more \u201cimportant\u201d matters ignores one of the most fascinating and inspiring stories of Native survival in New England history.\u00a0 The Paugussett people, far from being hapless and perpetual victims, adapted themselves with courage and panache to their new circumstances and took for themselves a page out of the white man\u2019s playbook.\u00a0 They not only survived; they prospered, and in many ways laid the groundwork for the modern community that we all know.<\/p>\n

Let us envision Fairfield County as it existed in the early days of the American republic: a collection of rural towns comprised basically of subsistence farms, with a handful of small manufactories and trading operations in the fledgling seaports.\u00a0 The Native population had basically been forced in its entirety off the reservations and had adapted Christianity and Anglo-Saxon surnames and outward lifestyles. They spoke English fluently in their public and private life (the last native speaker of the Paugussett language died in 1829, approaching her 100th<\/sup> birthday). They remained eminently conscious, however, of who and what they were, their cultural heritage amazingly intact beneath a veneer that was acceptable to their white neighbors (the diary kept by William Sherman from 1855 through the 1880s sheds much light on the depth and extent of this cultural survival).\u00a0 They generally supported themselves as farmhands, millhands, woodcutters, and general laborers in the country towns throughout the region.<\/p>\n

In 1828 a man by the name of Joel Freeman moved from Derby to Bridgeport and took employment as a hand on a West India schooner.\u00a0 Freeman had been born in 1795 in a remnant Paugussett community that survived at the fringes of white civilization (we learned of his tribal membership through the discovery of a document that names him as one of seven surviving heirs in New Haven County to Paugussett tribal lands).\u00a0 Freeman was a man with a vision who took it upon himself to gather the far-flung remnants of the Paugussett community, uniting it once again as a cultural and economic force in the nascent town of Bridgeport.\u00a0 His success is one of the remarkable untold stories of Native persistence during the days of Andrew Jackson\u2019s tenancy in the White House, a time when the Indian Removal Act was pushed through Congress as a final thrust of cultural genocide.<\/p>\n

Despite the prevailing culture\u2019s demands that Native peoples accept Protestant Christianity as their religion, Indians were treated as second-class members of their respective congregations.\u00a0 They generally had a non-voting status and were relegated to observing services from the balconies, out of the view of their white-skinned neighbors.\u00a0 Freeman took umbrage at this situation and resolved to do something about it.\u00a0 He became a circuit rider, traveling to isolated homesteads in towns like Redding, Easton, Monroe, Newtown, and Southbury, inspiring the inhabitants with his vision of a unified Native community with its very own place of worship.\u00a0 Beginning on a summer Sunday in that year of 1828, Indians from all over southwestern Connecticut gathered for divine service under the shelter of a great elm tree that stood until 1873 on the site of the present Bridgeport Public Library.<\/p>\n

Perhaps as a reaction to the President\u2019s initiatives in Washington to stamp out any last vestiges of the Red Man\u2019s culture, a determined community began to coalesce around Joel Freeman\u2019s residence on the shores of Bridgeport\u2019s outer harbor in what is today known as the South End.\u00a0 Joel loaned \u201cZion Church\u201d money to purchase a building lot, and more to construct a permanent edifice in 1835.\u00a0 Two brothers-in law opened a shipyard on Joel\u2019s property; another close neighbor became Bridgeport\u2019s largest purveyor of clams and oysters. The women of the community were renowned as cooks at a time when new-money white people aspired to European sophistication at their dining tables.\u00a0 Joel\u2019s sister Mary earned a fortune as a chef for New York City hotels, and Presence Jackson, Mary Freeman\u2019s neighbor across Main Street, was the head cook in the household of P.T. Barnum. In 1853 a major resort hotel opened, attracting people from all the major East Coast cities and cementing the community\u2019s reputation as one of the stellar examples of successful Native American enterprise.<\/p>\n

A man named William Sherman came of age during this heady period and partook of the South End community\u2019s intoxicating atmosphere. The son of one of the shipyard owners on Joel Freeman\u2019s property, Sherman worked his way up to the position of first mate on whaling ships out of New London, sailing around the world a total of nine times.\u00a0 We know from the meticulous records he kept that he was in frequent contact with virtually all members of the Golden Hill Paugussett tribe; that he was immersed in Indian culture and tradition, with particular emphasis on the use of medicinal plants; and that he served as a virtual ambassador of the Golden Hill Indians to the world at large, surviving into an era when the covert Indian activity of the Jacksonian era could begin to come out into the open.<\/p>\n

Sherman apparently fretted, however, about the prospects for cultural survival in a Bridgeport that was evolving from a relatively small seaport town to a polyglot and worldly industrial city. As the whaling business declined precipitously in the 1860s, he moved his young family to the rural village of Nichols, site of the Golden Hill reservation from 1841 to 1854 and perhaps the place where he himself had grown up.\u00a0 Sherman took it upon himself to secure a permanent land base for the tribe, working much of his adult life to purchase a small holding that contained an ancient Indian burial ground and to construct a house on it.\u00a0 This he deeded to the State of Connecticut prior to his death to be held in trust in perpetuity as the Golden Hill Reservation.\u00a0 Sherman\u2019s biography is included in both Hurd\u2019s (1881) and Orcutt\u2019s (1886) Histories, detailing his descent, his great knowledge of Native culture, and the responsibilities of his chieftainship.<\/p>\n

Unlike the other Indian reservations in Connecticut, and, indeed, the whole of the American continent, the land base William Sherman reestablished was minuscule (one-quarter of an acre), and therefore unable to provide living space for any real portion of the tribal membership.\u00a0 So, from the time of its inception in 1875, the Golden Hill Trumbull reservation has served more-or-less as the \u201cexecutive offices\u201d of the tribe, as well as the home of its chieftain.\u00a0 There are complex reasons why an urbanized tribe like the Paugussetts were not able to live together in a community:\u00a0 Due to treaties that went back to the days of first contact, reservation Indians were not taxed, were not liable for debts, and were not subject to certain laws, such as those pertaining to hunting and fishing licenses. Conversely, they were not allowed to vote or own real property.\u00a0 American Indians living on reservations did not obtain the right to become American citizens until 1924, and it was not until 1940 that Indians born on American soil were \u201cautomatically\u201d considered to be citizens of the United States!\u00a0 And so the rank-and-file membership of the Golden Hill Paugussett tribe continued to live out their lives in their respective communities in Bridgeport, in Ansonia, and scattered about the various towns of southeast Fairfield and southwest New Haven counties.<\/p>\n

The Paugussett tribe is remarkable for the continuity of its leadership, which can be traced back in an unbroken line from Queriheag in the 1630s, through Musquatt in the 1660s, Raumaug and Montaugk from the beginning to the middle of the 18th<\/sup> century, and Tom Sherman (Shoran) as that century drew to a close.\u00a0 Tom Sherman Jr. assumed the leadership role following his father\u2019s death in 1801, and served until his own passing in 1849 (it should be noted that Joel Freeman served in a demonstrable leadership role in the South End community as well until his death in 1865).\u00a0 This brings us to William Sherman, the first of the Paugussett tribal leaders to attract the interest of a plethora of writers, newsmen, and biographers during the course of his lifetime.<\/p>\n

William Sherman was succeeded as chief in 1886 by his son George (b. 1871).\u00a0 George\u2019s daughter, Ethel, was installed as \u201cChieftess Rising Star\u201d at an impressive ceremony in 1933 that attracted 20 tribal chiefs from across America.\u00a0 George\u2019s son, Edward, was named \u201cChief Black Hawk\u201d following the father\u2019s passing in 1938.\u00a0 Black Hawk served for the remainder of his life, which ended in 1974.\u00a0 The next in line was Ethel\u2019s son, Aurelius, known as \u201cChief Big Eagle.\u201d\u00a0 Big Eagle became a nationally known spokesman for Indian rights and, like his great-grandfather William Sherman, fought for the preservation and renewal of the tribe\u2019s land base.\u00a0 Under his leadership a second reservation, 108 acres in size, was purchased for the tribe in the Eastern Connecticut town of Colchester (1981).<\/p>\n

Recognized by the Colony and State of Connecticut continuously for some 350 years, the Golden Hill Paugussett tribe applied for Federal recognition with a simple heartfelt letter from Chief Big Eagle to President Ronald Reagan in 1982.\u00a0 Meanwhile, in October of 1983 President Reagan signed a bill which granted Federal recognition to Connecticut\u2019s Mashantucket Pequot tribe, exempting them from the normal administrative process of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which requires documentation of cultural and community continuity as well as political organization for each and every decade from the time of first contact to the present day.\u00a0 The Mashantuckets went on to build the world\u2019s largest resort casino, which for a time was also among the most lucrative.\u00a0 In 1994 the Mohegan tribe across the river was also federally recognized, despite the seeming disqualification factor that the tribe had voluntarily disbanded itself in 1861.\u00a0 The Mohegans as well went on to build one of the world\u2019s most lucrative gaming facilities.<\/p>\n

As can be seen, the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act by Congress in 1988 created a new dynamic that skewed the motivation in many people\u2019s minds for seeking Federal recognition.\u00a0 Chief Big Eagle, perplexed by the seeming inequity of having one of the state\u2019s tribes skate through the process while the others were held to standards that were virtually impossible to meet (how does one account for tribal cultural and political activity as witnessed by \u2018disinterested third-party sources\u2019 during the decade of the 1830s, for example, when by the government\u2019s own policies such activities would have resulted in exile of the entire tribe to the dreaded Oklahoma Territory?), decided to retire from this active pursuit.\u00a0 In 1991 he named his son Aurelius Jr. \u201cChief Quiet Hawk,\u201d and retired from the fray.<\/p>\n

Chief Quiet Hawk, an ex-Marine, rose to the occasion.\u00a0 He doggedly pursued the quest for recognition, overcoming every bureaucratic hurdle as it was thrown in his way.\u00a0 Thousands upon thousands of records were scrutinized from every archival source, putting together a rather complete picture of a continuing relationship between the Golden Hill Paugussetts and the Colony and State.\u00a0 The onus was put on the tribe to account for the inadequacy and incompetence of the state\u2019s own appointed overseers, who often charged hefty fees to the tribe\u2019s accounts while neglecting to keep any records at all.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the Governor of the State of Connecticut and the entire congressional delegation stood united in opposition to the Paugussetts ever being granted Federal recognition.\u00a0 Many prejudicial statements were issued by elected officials that would seem to have tainted the integrity of the evaluation process.<\/p>\n

Chief Big Eagle died in August, 2008 at the age of 91, never living to see the hoped-for day when recognition would be granted.\u00a0 In the face of daunting opposition, Chief Quiet Hawk remains unrelenting in his quest for justice.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n

Batchellor, C.S., and R. Edward Steck. \u201cIndian Archeology in and around Bridgeport, Connecticut.\u201d Bulletin of the Archeological Society of Connecticut, <\/em>No. 12 (May, 1941).<\/p>\n

Brilvitch, Charles W. A History of Connecticut\u2019s Golden Hill Paugussett Tribe.\u00a0 <\/em>Charleston: The History Press, 2007.<\/p>\n

DeForest, John William. History of the Indians of Connecticut. <\/em>Hartford: W.J. Hammersley, 1851.<\/p>\n

Hurd, D. Hamilton. A History of Fairfield County, Connecticut. <\/em>Philadelphia: J.W. Lewis & Co., 1881.<\/p>\n

Lavin, Lucianne. Connecticut\u2019s Indigenous Peoples. <\/em>New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.<\/p>\n

Mandell, Daniel R. Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England 1780–1880. <\/em>Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.<\/p>\n

Menta, John P. The Quinnipiac: Cultural Conflict in Southern New England. <\/em>New Haven: Yale University Publications in Anthropology, 2003.<\/p>\n

Orcutt, Rev. Samuel. A History of the Old Town of Stratford and the City of Bridgeport. <\/em>Bridgeport: Fairfield County Historical Society, 1886.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Charles Brilvitch The Golden Hill Paugussett tribe has been a part of Greater Bridgeport\u2019s history from time immemorial.\u00a0 The original indigenous people of this region, who greeted the first European explorers and settlers and who were responsible for the pottery fragments, arrowheads, and shell middens excavated by archaeologists over the years, still manage to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":12640,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[237,45,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-native-american-populations-and-culture","category-south-end","category-social-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12639"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15125,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12639\/revisions\/15125"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}