By Sofia Oumoussa, University of Hawaii Manoa
I went to northern Morocco expecting to write about oral history and I came back writing about wells!
For five weeks this summer, from Beni Chiker to Beni Ansar, from Azghenghan to Yassinin, four villages in the eastern Rif where my mother’s and father’s families come from, I met with elders, listened to community members, drank an unreasonable amount of tea, and recorded stories that have never made it into any academic archive.
The project I proposed to the Tyler Center was called Re-storying the Rif: Centering Imazighen Indigenous Oral History in Northern Morocco. That was the title I brought with me. But research is going somewhere without knowing what you’ll find. And what I found was that in every interview I did, the story eventually came back to the same place. A well. Spring. Water. In our language, we call it aman. So, the project became What the Wells Remember.
What global research gave me
I was born in Belgium, in the Amazigh-Moroccan diaspora. My parents left Nador as children in the guest-worker generation of the 1960s. Growing up in a foreign country, we spoke Tarifit at home and French outside. Nobody in my childhood ever used the word “Indigenous.” That was not a conversation we had.
Then I moved to Hawaiʻi for university, and for the first time in my life, I heard the vocabulary such as indigeneity, sovereignty, oral history, used by a community I recognized as my own. When my grandmother passed away, I realized the songs she used to sing were disappearing with her. That is what inspired me
Going back to Morocco as a researcher, not just a granddaughter, changed everything. I learned to conduct semi-structured oral history interviews in the languages of home with my father as my translator. I learned to navigate the paradox of being both insider and outsider, I was close enough to be trusted with stories a stranger wouldn’t hear, distant enough that some elders were suspicious.
I learned to sit with 108-degree heat, sporadic internet, and equipment that overheated as often as I did. And I learned to earn trust from these communities. What looks like suspicion, I came to understand, is what generations of betrayal produce.
The theme I came back with
The most important thing I learned this summer is that oral memory is not a supplement to the archive. In communities like the eastern Rif, oral memory is the archive and is urgent and crucial in the near future.
Three stories carry this. Hisham, the last inhabitant of a nearly abandoned village, told me about wells that a Portuguese man had built by hand before the war, a whole layer of the region’s water history that appears in no academic literature. My grandfather was formally employed by the Spanish city of Melilla to guard a spring on Moroccan soil so that Melilla could drink, an arrangement no published document describes. And around the abandoned iron mine at Iksane (which the colonial archive calls Ouixane, Ouichane, or Uixán, a small act of what scholars call toponymic violence), community members told me the trees had started to die, and the wells had changed taste. Now, a 2025 peer-reviewed study in Chemosphere confirmed the site is “highly reactive and environmentally hazardous.”
That is the message I most want to share. The stories that shape a place are held in the people who lived them and they disappear on human timelines.
What’s next
I’m returning to the University of Hawaiʻi with a poster, a presentation, and a body of recordings that I will put together to make a short documentary. From here I’m building a public ArcGIS StoryMap.
This project has taught me who I am as a new researcher: someone who works at the intersection of water and Indigenous journalism. I’m currently a staff reporter with the Mānoa Mirror and pursuing a certificate in Peace and Conflict Studies. What comes next is the slow work of turning five weeks of listening into a lifetime of returning what was said.
In loving memory of my grandmother, who lit the spark to start this project.
