At stake in the matter of Chief Victor Buffalo v. Her Majesty The Queen are not only billions of dollars that taxpayers may be ordered to hand over to a handful of Indian tribes, but fundamental questions about the obligation of a modern industrial country to protect the welfare of the people who were here first.Unlike most Indian litigation in Canada, this case is not directly about land or hunting rights. It's about oil--517 million barrels of high quality crude that was pumped between 1954 and 1990 from beneath tribal land, the Pigeon Lake Reserve, 30 miles southwest of Edmonton.