What is the lesson of the First Thanksgiving? The one we designate with capital letters. The one that has caused generations of schoolchildren to don paper Pilgrim hats or Indian feathers.

It is a lesson about diversity and inclusion. To put it bluntly in modern terms: The white guys were immigrants to a continent the red men had lived in for centuries. The red men knew how to prosper, not just survive, in a wilderness that may well have wiped out the Pilgrims if not for the help of the natives.

Quarters were cramped and the passage was rough as the 100-foot Mayflower was buffeted by storms crossing the Atlantic, missing its mark of Virginia, and finally docking at Plymouth. Two people died en route — one of the 102 passengers and one of the 30 or so crew members. They arrived in November 1620 after three months a sea.

Half of the Pilgrims died in their first bitter winter. Many starved, others suffered disease.

In 1621, fifty Pilgrims and 90 native Americans celebrated what we now call the First Thanksgiving. One of the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow, wrote a letter to an old friend on Dec. 11, 1621 in which he described not just the three-day feast but the Indians who had made survival possible for the new colony of white people.

“We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors,” Winslow wrote. “Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn….”

In short, the Indians taught the Pilgrims what they needed to know — how to plant corn and fertilize it — in order to survive in their New World. By Winslow’s account, the Indians did this willingly.

“We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us: We often go to them, and they come to us; some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them…,” he wrote.

As is so often true in human exchanges, because one party was helpful and peaceable, the other responded in kind.

“We for our parts walk as peaceably and safely in the wood, as in the highways in England, we entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us,” wrote Winslow.

Because it is often hard to understand people with cultures different from our own, Winslow assumed the Indians who helped him and the other Pilgrims had no religion because their spiritual beliefs were not like his own. They dressed differently, too. But, still, he could see their worth as fellow human beings.

“They are a people without any religion, or knowledge of any God,” Winslow wrote, “yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just, the men and women go naked, only a skin about their middles; for the temper of the air, here it agreeth well with that in England…”

After the first harvest, William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, called for a celebration. The way Winslow describes it, the Pilgrims entertained the Indians and provided a feast for them while the Indians, in return, supplied venison. They rejoiced together.

“Our harvest being gotten in,” wrote Winslow, “our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others.”

We will keep Winslow’s words in our minds and hearts as we celebrate this Thanksgiving. We are thankful we live in the state of New York, built with the sweat and brains of wave upon wave of immigrants from all the corners of the Earth.

We are thankful to have a governor who has decried the recent explosion of hate crimes, and on Sunday at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City outlined a plan to contain them — creating a State Police Unite to investigate reports of hate crimes, expanding the state’s human rights law to protect all students, and establishing an emergency legal defense fund for immigrants. He has also set up a hotline for people to report hate crimes.

“There is no place for racism, there is no place for hate, there is no place for swastikas, there is no place for racially inflammatory and divisive rhetoric or acts,” Andrew Cuomo said last week. “This is New York. This is America.  We are all immigrants….We’re not going to be pitted one against another. We are people from all different races, from all different countries, from different religions, but we are one community….”

On Sunday, he told the Abyssinian congregation. “New York is your home and refuge, and we will do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”

We are thankful to live in a state where last week the commissioner of education and the attorney general sent a letter to every school district in New York, responding to “disturbing incidents of bias and hate-based acts of bigotry, including vandalism, harassment, bullying, and even violence.” They wrote, “School communities have a critically important role to play...during challenging times like these when communities around New York and the nation experience unrest.”

We each have a critical role to play — to be welcoming and helpful like the Indians were to the Pilgrim immigrants whom they could have easily left to starve to death in the wilderness.

This Thanksgiving, we will be thankful and rejoice that we live in the state of New York and the nation of the United States that has as its symbol the Statue of Liberty. Her lamp has lit the way to welcome generations of immigrants to a land of plenty.

“Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” wrote Emma Lazarus on a poem inscribed on the statue’s pedestal. “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

America is a land whose plenty can be realized only if we share it, working together peaceably to help one another, as the Indians did the Pilgrims.

So, as we celebrate Thanksgiving, let us remember our nation, unique in all the world and all the world’s history, has been built by immigrants, starting with the Pilgrims. And so it should continue.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer