In 1959, when Cooper-Teran's mother was two years old, her Yaqui village of Batuc in the Sonoran Desert was flooded by a giant dam that had been erected by the Mexican government. This led to a mass exodus of hundreds of families who had lived in the valley for generations, submerging their stories, history and culture underwater. The apex of the stone church, jutting out over the flood waters, is all that remains of Batuc. Every several years, during Holy Week, the waters recede and the last surviving villagers return to the valley, mourning and celebrating the memories of their village through song and dance in the town square.

In 2003 Uyehara visited her relatives in Itoman Village, Okinawa, the southernmost islands of Japan. They took her to the caves where they hid during the Battle of Okinawa, and also to the animist, pre-Shinto and pre-Buddhist sites of worship and burial. She observed that Okinawans today live in the shadow of the U.S. military which never left the islands while struggling to maintain their cultural heritage. She found herself a walking contradiction -- carrying a U.S. passport but of Japanese and Okinawan decent. In addition, Uyehara revisited an ancient oceanic myth in which a brother and sister survive a great flood, becoming the progenitors of Okinawa.

Archipelago investigates the metaphor of water that winds through early origin stories from the Ryukyu kingdom, and the history of the Yaqui River Valley. It harnesses the cultural resonance found on "islands" – islands situated in the desert and islands found in the ocean. The performance sheds light on how these cultures have survived as islands -- geographic or metaphoric in nature – in the midst of colonization from surrounding forces.