A hummingbird darting toward Mount Diablo to bring fire back to her people takes center stage at Children's Fairyland's Open Storybook Puppet Theater starting September 30, as the Oakland park premieres its first Ohlone puppet show. Hummingbird Saves Fire, an adaptation of the Lisjan fire creation story, will run through November 29 with daily showtimes at 11 a.m., 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.
The production grew out of a partnership between Fairyland, the Lisjan Nation and the Oakland-based Sogorea Te' Land Trust, according to The Oaklandside. Deja Gould, the Lisjan Nation's historical preservation officer and language keeper, helped adapt the fire creation story into a puppetry show for children after the tribe brought in a storykeeper to recount it orally. Gould also provided the narrative that Fairyland's puppet team then shaped into a working script.
Maria Rodriguez, lead creator with Fairyland's puppet theater, said she could immediately picture how the visual dynamics of fire would translate to the stage, the outlet reports. Rodriguez and the Fairyland team crafted Gould's narrative into the finished script, with set design incorporating East Bay natural settings, native plants and a Mount Diablo backdrop. The show's collaborators are mostly Indigenous, including its voice actors and set designers, and Gould is separately creating beadwork for the puppet costumes that incorporates shells and nuts used in contemporary Indigenous jewelry.
A Story Kept Mostly Within Families
To Gould's knowledge, the fire creation story has not previously been performed in this way, having existed mainly as an oral tradition passed down within families. The show is intended to demonstrate that Indigenous people still exist in Oakland, a point organizers see as central to the production.
The Lisjan Nation is a confederation of Ohlone, Bay Miwok, Plains Miwok, Delta Yokut and Patwin peoples whose ancestral territory spans five Bay Area counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, Napa and San Joaquin — and the tribe today counts around 100 total members. The Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation lacks federal recognition from the U.S. government, which strips it of reservation land rights and pushes tribal leaders toward nonprofit land trusts and municipal agreements to reclaim stewardship of ancestral land, according to Bay Nature. That dynamic helps explain why partnerships like the one behind this puppet show carry outsized weight for the tribe's visibility.
Land, Language and a Growing Partnership
Sogorea Te' Land Trust works to return land to Indigenous stewardship across the East Bay, and its reach has grown substantially in recent years. In April 2024 the trust completed a $27 million transaction to acquire the 2.2-acre West Berkeley Shellmound, a 5,700-year-old Ohlone village and burial site, in what Sogorea Te' Land Trust describes as one of the largest urban land-back victories in U.S. history. The purchase was funded primarily through a $20 million contribution from the Shuumi Land Tax, a voluntary annual contribution program established in November 2015 that lets non-Indigenous Bay Area residents and institutions on ancestral Lisjan territory support Indigenous land rematriation; “Shuumi” means “gift” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language, per Sogorea Te' Land Trust.
Gould's own family history is bound up in that language work. The Chochenyo Ohlone language had no living fluent speakers after the 1934 death of José Guzmán, Gould's great-great-grandfather, until Gould began reviving it using 1920s UC Berkeley wax cylinder recordings, the land trust notes. In December 2022, Oakland became the first Bay Area city to return municipal land stewardship to an unrecognized tribe, granting Sogorea Te' Land Trust a permanent cultural conservation easement over 5 acres in Joaquin Miller Park, a deal that allows private tribal ceremonies while keeping the park open to the public, according to Bay Nature.
Roots Going Back to a Fairyland Sign
Fairyland and the Lisjan Nation's partnership dates back to 2024, when Ines Ixierda posted a social media image altering the park's entrance sign to read “Ohlone Land.” The gesture stuck: an altered sign has been displayed each fall beginning around Indigenous Peoples' Day since 2024, and in October 2025 Children's Fairyland transformed its own sign to read Children's Ohloneland, per the Oaklandside report. The collaboration has since expanded into programming and curriculum discussions, with Fairyland adding Indigenous educational elements to its curriculum and exploring ways to expand park access for Indigenous communities.
The park itself sits by Lake Merritt, once marshland bordering Lisjan villages before Oakland grew up around it. Fairyland is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 699 Bellevue Ave., with admission costing $19.08 for kids and $21.20 for adults.
Native Community Day Set for November
Organizers have scheduled a Native Community Day for November 8, which will include tribal members, artists and voice actors who collaborated on the show. Corrina Gould and Kymberly Miller are both slated to give remarks at the event, according to the Oaklandside account.
The premiere lands during the 70th year of Fairyland's Open Storybook Puppet Theater, which opened in 1956 and is recognized as the oldest continuously operating puppet theater in the United States, per Children's Fairyland's own history. Hoodline covered the milestone in its anniversary Puppet Fair weekend coverage weeks before this premiere. The theater's pedigree includes Muppeteer Frank Oz, who began his career there at age 14 in the late 1950s working alongside his mother, a puppet costume designer whose work remains in use at the park today.
Randal Metz has worked at Fairyland for more than 50 years, and the puppet theater now holds a repertoire of over 150 different stories. Building a single new puppet for the Open Storybook Puppet Theater takes about 40 hours of labor across five days and costs roughly $2,000, the Oaklandside has reported. Fairyland has woven in stories and performance traditions from across Oakland's cultures over the years, including bilingual storytelling boxes narrating in English and Spanish since 2009, and its most recent production before this one, a Puerto Rican folktale called How the Coquí Got Their Name, ran through May 28.
