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 occupancy of the land by Samoan custom. Traditional boundaries are based both on the borders as they have been recognized historically, and on which village actually is using the land. Efforts to undertake a land survey to document the current situation have been unsuccessful. Thus, the boundaries of most villages do not have specific locations, are not property lines, and are not recorded in writing. Furthermore, boundaries can change as owned lands are sold or developed, and the location of a boundary can be open to interpretation; villages may appeal to the High Court of American Samoa for a final legal adjudication of the location of disputed boundaries. New villages may be established from existing ones, with boundaries based on mutual agreement. Villages may merge by deciding to share a chief and council.

The Census Bureau, for statistical purposes, recognizes only those villages with both a pulenuu and a village council in accordance with the American Samoa Code. (Some villages have a single council, but have pulenuus associated with separate areas; in those instances, the Census Bureau identified block boundaries that approximately delimited each such area so that data users could allocate 1990 census figures to each portion of the village.) Because the village boundaries are traditional and not fixed by law, the Census Bureau recognizes them on its maps as traditional boundaries rather than as legally documented corporate limits, and does not show village boundaries at all, if possible. Contrary to information that the American Samoa government provided to the Census Bureau for the 1980 census, the county boundaries—but not the district boundaries—change as village boundaries adjust to changing ownership and court decisions. Thus, for the 1990 census, the villages nested within counties except where a village crossed a district line (only Nu’uuli village does so).

As it had in the past, the Economic Development Planning Office of the American Samoa government provided the information necessary for the Census Bureau to identify and delineate the several legal entities. The Census Bureau also worked with that agency to establish BNAs and BGs that would result in 1990 census data for meaningful geographic units. The BNAs were to contain, as an optimum, 300 housing units, but could 7-18Puerto Rico and the Outlying Areas