AMHERST — In both Hadley and Northampton, as well in as other communities throughout the Connecticut River Valley, Black women were among those enslaved by the region’s European settlers in the 1600s and by those living in Massachusetts until slavery was phased out in the late 1780s.

Yet the region’s direct ties to slavery and keeping Black people captive are often overlooked or ignored, both in the history books and in the modern understanding of slavery, says Jennifer DeClue, an associate professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College.

Seeking to rectify this, DeClue is undertaking a project titled “Enslaved in New England: Black Women and the Afterlife of Northern Bondage.”

“Black women were enslaved in each of these towns,” DeClue said. “Afterlife is about being in a place that doesn’t recognize its role in slavery.”

DeClue and Julia Jorati, a UMass philosophy professor, are among the first four fellows in the Slavery North Initiative at the University of Massachusetts, aiming to broaden the understanding of slavery’s impact in both the Northeast United States and throughout Canada.

Jorati’s study, “Enslaved within the Bowels of a Free Country: Black Antislavery Authors in Massachusetts, 1773–1783” is expanding on knowledge of what people were writing in the lead-up to the state’s prohibition on slavery.

“This fits well with the research I’m already doing,” Jorati said. “I’ve previously written a book about philosophical debates about slavery.”

Jorati is finding robust and lively discussion in letters to the editor, essays and court cases, though there are only some scattered references to western Massachusetts.

One comes from a biracial preacher, Lemuel Haynes in the Hampden County town of Granville, who had an unpublished antislavery treatise. There are also petitions by Black Massachusetts residents demanding abolition and, in some cases, reparations.

Over the fall semester, the fellows have taken up residency in offices carved out of what formerly was the Newman Catholic Center, before that moved to a new building nearby and UMass bought the building.

Last Friday, Slavery North held a holiday open house to formally introduce the work of the cohort and have brief talks by both Chancellor Javier Reyes and College of Humanities and Fine Art Dean Lupe Davidson.

Charmaine A. Nelson, founding director of Slavery North and provost professor of art history, said the initiative is the only one that exists focusing on cold weather locations, such as New England, New York and Pennsylvania and Canada, to broaden the understanding of how slavery had more far-reaching impacts than the traditionally told stories of the transatlantic slave trade and the plantations of the American South.

Nelson, who grew up in Canada, said public schools have avoided the topic, often only discussing slavery in the context of the Underground Railroad and the other efforts that brought Black people to freedom.

But this masks her home country’s own participation in the brutal history of enslaving Black people, whether it be in actually keeping slaves or locating runaway slaves, or benefiting from investments in the industries that ran off slave labor.

Nelson wants the fellows to increase access to primary materials and better tell the continued impacts of slavery into modern times, from hypersurveillance and brutalization to isolation and separation of families.

Nelson said they are already opening up new avenues of research from the 1400s through the 1800s.

Mellon Foundation grant

Slavery North is largely funded through a three-year, $2.65 million Mellon Foundation award, the largest such grant ever made to UMass Amherst, which put the initiative on the path to becoming a research center and institute.

In addition to the two visiting professors, both of whom are on sabbatical, one doctoral student and one artist in residence are on site, with four new artists in residence coming in January.

Chris Gismondi, a University of New Brunswick doctoral student, is centering his project on enslaved women in Pennsylvania and Ontario and looking at whether there was a spike in people running away from captivity.

“Gender, Family and Gradual Abolition in Upper Canada and Northern Slavery, 1760-1833” is the title of his work. Gismondi said there are archival challenges, such as finding out about an enslaved man in Toronto who writes back from Schenectady, New York to buy his freedom.

Gismondi’s dissertation may eventually be turned into a book. “All of us are dedicated to spreading the work and the history,” Gismondi said.

The collaboration and discussion has been important, rather than working in isolation. Also on site is David Montaro, an investigative journalist and author, an artist in residence focused on “The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations.” Nelson said this is about finding Wall Street’s ties to plantations in the South and uncovering connections to wealthy Boston merchants.

Locally, DeClue’s research includes poring through diaries, bills of sale and getting information from Porter Phelps Huntington House in Hadley, where six enslaved African Americans worked. She is also trying to locate those living in the area who self-emanicipated. She observes the first ministers in Hadley, in the 17th century, were all slave owners.

DeClue said one of challenges in the 1700s is that the sale of enslaved people happened before they arrived in western Massachusetts, meaning there is little detail about who they are, even as the bills of sale often included rich detail, as the people were considered valuable property.

Research database

Nelson said the fellows are also helping to build a database to make research easier than perusing microfilm and needing cooperation from librarians. Some libraries won’t provide help to locate the materials, fugitive slave advertisements and letters, and others have scrubbed out what are viewed as offensive terms, making it harder to quickly locate information.

Slavery North will be doing research and workshops, training archivists, and hosting art exhibitions, partnering with four art galleries on campus.

Nelson said the hope is to also welcome playwrights, screenwriters, mixed media artists and children’s writers. Part of this is to engage the larger community, rather than focus only on educational journals or publications by academics that are unlikely to enjoy a wide audience.

“We want everything we do to be public-facing,” Nelson said.