A sound mind

Aug. 25—On paper, Santa Fean Madi Sato's expansive life history reads as a meditation on mourning, embracing Indigenous heritage, and survival.

Set to music, those powerful ingredients swirl into an other-wordly mashup of narration, pieces of familiar songs, and haunting chants aimed at evoking emotions mere words cannot.

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Hummingbird Rising: The Life & Music of Madi Sato

7 p.m. Saturday, August 26, and 2 p.m. Sunday, August 27

Black Box Theater, Performing Arts Building, Institute of American Indian Arts, 83 Avan Nu Po Road

$10 to $25, donorbox.org/events/455546

Sato will share her story via voice and motion as part of Hummingbird Rising: The Life & Music of Madi Sato, set for this weekend at the Institute of American Indian Arts. It marks a return to performing for Sato, who released three albums between 2002 and 2011, then took a break to raise a family.

Identity is a multipronged source of pride and exploration for Sato, who hails from two homelands not commonly associated with each other: Japan and the American Deep South. She also traces her roots to the Ainu Indigenous group from the northernmost of Japan's islands, where her father grew up, and Ireland, home of her mother's ancestors.

"My [paternal] grandmother had these icy blue eyes," she says, adding that her father also had some distinctive physical characteristics that offered clues to his heritage. "It was never talked about in my family."

Sato talks, sings, and chants about it, as well as about her family's uncomfortable reality after her father's death. While Sato was born in the United States, her father had recently moved his family — Sato, her mother, and her two siblings — to Japan when he unexpectedly died at age 32. He had wanted to raise them in his native culture. Sato was 5.

Her father had been studying in Georgia when he met her mother. Following his death, the family returned to the South, where Sato says her mother attempted to make ends meet as a songwriter and performer. Sato estimates that she moved with her family every year until she was 16, when they arrived in Santa Fe.

Music has long been a source of comfort for Sato. Her mother mourned her father's passing at the piano, sending notes and bars floating up into the void left by his untimely departure.

"It was my mother's healing and also my healing," Sato says. "I really wanted to get on stage when I was a child after my father died because I felt bigger than myself [when on stage]. I felt that I could express these massive emotions and stories that I was too shy to share personally. [Performing] became a way of me putting my emotions and my story into something, and it never has left me."

Sato's mother was a trained pianist who'd sung in church as a child in North Carolina.

"It wasn't until my father passed that she began to write songs and perform as a livelihood," Sato says. "Her grief chased her from town to town after my father died. We were in poverty, because she couldn't work too well with three children. We were in and out of homes. For a time, we even lived in the woods, in tents."

More about Madi

Madi Sato has released three albums: Soul in Love, Madi Sato, and Return to the River. The latter was released in 2011, around the time a tsunami devastated swaths of one of her homelands.

Sato and husband Timothy P. McLaughlin, a spoken word poet, are the co-founders of the nonprofit organization Praising Earth. It lists its mission as renewing humanity's essential place in the wild ecology.

For information about the organization, Sato, or McLaughlin, visit praisingearth.org.

When it was time for Sato's family to move on from Santa Fe, she stayed behind.

"I had been cast in a very professional musical theater show called Hair," she says. "It felt like life was opening up for me here, and there were opportunities."

Hair was staged by the since-closed Santa Fe Performing Arts, a theater company for students. Sato attended Santa Fe High, then the College of Santa Fe, studying theater and then music at the latter. About a decade ago, she hit pause on her musical pursuits to raise her three children; Hummingbird Rising marks her return.

Sato's children are growing up in one spot, a luxury she didn't get to enjoy. Her stays in most previous homes were short-lived — including in Japan. She spent less than a year there, coming back to the U.S. when she was 6.

"When I returned [to Japan] at age 28, I remembered the house of my grandmother," she says. "I remembered the smells. I knew where the rooms were; they just looked much smaller than I had remembered as a kid."

Sato estimates she has returned to Japan about seven times since that fateful visit 20 years ago.

"I made a point of going there to study the traditional music, and of course to see my family," she says.

That family had a major scare in 2011, when an earthquake and a resulting tsunami devastated northern Japan, killing at least 20,000 people. Multiple family members were missing for days, Sato says. Power was knocked out at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant about 75 miles south of Sendai, where her family lives, while operations were suspended at two other nuclear plants — including the one in Sendai.

"I go through this moment where, after becoming a mother, I find myself at the foot of the stage at an altar," she says, describing part of Hummingbird Rising. "With a bowl of water and a candle, I go down to my knees and begin telling the story of the tsunami. This is the moment where it becomes the universal story that we're all in right now, which is these massive Earth changes, massive societal changes that we are all having to reckon with, and they're bringing us to our knees. So I'm on my knees, and I begin to paint myself as the wailing woman."

The show opening is meant to mimic a Japanese Tanabata festival, also known as the star festival. Attendees will be invited to make pine bough offerings to a makeshift river on the stage.

The interactivity suits Sato.

"This is what has kept me returning to the music," she says. "To me, human connection is everything."