In the pre-Saharan oases of southern Morocco, changing land use practices represent key sites for contestations around livelihoods, political authority, and social hierarchies. In the predominantly Berber Mgoun valley, extended drought and longstanding poverty have spurred many mountain residents to move into newly settled areas of the steppe in order to gain access to wage labor. Along with migration remittances, this has created an economic dynamism that spurs agricultural expansion into the steppe around regional market towns. These two major phenomena – the conversion of uncultivated steppe into agricultural land and the expansion of housing settlements from oasis communities into the steppe – reflect shifts in land tenure systems resulting from transformations in livelihoods and social hierarchies in the region. People increasingly challenge tenure regimes and communal institutions historically identified as characteristically Berber, not because they reject their Berber roots but out of a renewed commitment to them. Their sense of place shapes how households construct their livelihood strategies; it also drives their resistance against historical inequalities and the institutions that supported them. While households with the resources and prestige to navigate customary tenure regimes in their favor use these institutions to access land, marginalized families instead mobilize to divide collective lands and secure individual freehold tenure. With these new forms of resistance, many of the most marginalized remain “true” to their Berber identity, in contrast to the communal institutions that many see as having been co-opted by a national government and local elites unconcerned with –even hostile to – their well-being. In this paper, I explore household livelihood strategies and their relationship with land use practices through a detailed analysis of 12 households in three communities in the Mgoun valley. Assessing these households’ diverse activities in the past and present contextualizes their decision-making about how they use land and negotiate tenure regimes. Even for households with a tenuous link to agriculture or with minimal holdings, land and a related sense of place are fundamental both to their livelihood strategies and to their sense of identity as Berbers. This cultural importance underlies the contestations around land tenure that are intensifying throughout the region.