This paper analyzes the costs and benefits of the adoption of a global discourse on indigenous rights by Berber (Amazigh) activists in Morocco. Drawing on the case of the southeastern oasis of Goulmima where I have pursued ethnographic research for the past ten years, I explore how activists negotiate between different scales of engagement. I examine how they attempt to balance their participation in national and transnational fora where "Berber culture" is deployed as an object of political struggle, with demands from local constituencies that they attend to issues of regional relevance – namely, the procuring and protection of infrastructural resources (land, water, electricity, education, etc.). Effective local engagement requires translocal connections to urban journalists, state functionaries, and international NGOs, connections that are accumulated through Amazigh ethno-politics. Yet, the over-accumulation of such non-local relations generates local suspicion that activists are playing "politics" (siyasa) for their own personal gain, or worse that their national and transnational engagement in Berber politics is bringing undue state scrutiny to local affairs. In other words, as the paper seeks to demonstrate, Amazigh activists in rural towns like Goulmima face a scalar dilemma only partly of their own making. In highlighting these scalar discontinuities, I engage and challenge earlier anthropological models of "segmentary" or "composite" societies that presume either a singular logic of political action or a unified structure of commensurable, nested organizational forms.