It will be retold in a place that is freighted with meaning, the Marble Collegiate Church, at Fifth Avenue and 29th Street. As one of the Collegiate Churches of New York, it is a direct descendant of the first church in New Amsterdam, which counted Minuit as one of its elders. The production received financial support from Intersections International, a branch of the Collegiate Churches.

The tickets for the one-night-only performance on Thursday at 7 p.m. are $24, a price the opera’s promoters set with Minuit’s purchase clearly in mind. The money from ticket sales will go toward developing a home for the Lenape Center in Manhattan. The Rev. Bob Chase, the founding director of Intersections International, said the Collegiate Church held a reconciliation ceremony in 2009 to apologize for what Minuit did and “to acknowledge publicly our complicity in imposing an alien economic and judicial system on the Lenape people, which ultimately caused great hardship, violence and even death.”

He also said the church “determined this would not be a kumbaya moment, a one-time commemoration.”

That led to a decision to support programs like the Lenape Center, which commissioned the opera. It is mostly written in English, but the libretto has a sprinkling of Native American vocabulary. On Page 2 of the libretto, a footnote explains that “awanots” means “fair-skinned strangers.”

To the people he encountered, Minuit certainly was one. He “is revered in history as a New Yorker,” said Mr. Bellemer, the tenor who will portray him on Thursday. “But going back to the story and hearing it from the viewpoint of the indigenous people, he is a bit of a buffoon.”

The price he paid was 60 guilders. How much was that? A 19th-century historian did the currency conversion that stuck. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace wrote in “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” that given the amount of gold in a 17th-century guilder, the total was worth $669.42 when their book was published in 1998. The website Straight Dope said in the 1990s that 60 guilders would buy one and a half pounds of silver; that much silver would cost $385 to $395 today, depending on the spot price of silver.