This paper challenges the pervasiveness of the French colonial narrative on the Beni Hilal invasions of the eleventh century C.E. It uses sources from the colonial forestry service in 1930's Morocco to introduce a narrative critical of the prevailing “modernist” interpretations of the Beni Hilali incursions in North Africa, and their impact on the local environment. The first wave of French colonizers, who equated sedentary, export-oriented agriculture with modern civilization, believed the Beni Hilal invaded North Africa like a swarm of locusts in the 11th century , imported their nomadic, uncivilized modus vivendi and disrupted the inevitable progress of the native (Christian) Berber civilization. In the 1930s, conventional scholarship on the Beni Hilal posited arguments consistent with the ideology and hierarchies of the civilizing mission. The French civilizing mission would implant a modern, enlightened governance where previously there had been only chaos. In doing so, they would free the current descendants of the Beni Hilal from their self-destructive social, political and economic conditions that had enslaved them for the past eight hundred years . This paper argues, however, that dissent from the dominant paradigms of French historiography existed at the heart of the colonial endeavor. Revisions to the Beni Hilal narrative, done by scholars and foresters attached to the French forestry service in Morocco in the 1930s and 1940s, reveal that the official discourse on the topic had its detractors long before more recent “post-colonial “ assessments of the Hilali invasions. The reports produced by the French forestry service during the 30s and 40s faulted colonialism for inflicting serious harm on the welfare and environment of North Africans. While they prescribed different solutions to contemporaneous conditions, the reports generally advocated a return to pre-colonial environmental policies. Aside from exposing some of the inherent contradictions of the colonial regime , the varying reports by the French forestry service also challenge the main tenets of the standard historiography of North African history.