Honouring anthropologist Richard J. Preston and his outstanding career with the Crees in northern Quebec, Together We Survive presents new research by Preston's colleagues, former students, and family members who - like him - have established long-term, respectful research partnerships and friendships with Aboriginal communities. Demonstrating the influential nature of Preston's collaborative approach on anthropologists in Canada and beyond, the essays in Together We Survive explore development and urbanization, material culture, and conflict. Scholars who conducted research in the 1960s with Crees farther to the south broaden the scope of Preston's Cree Narrative (2002). A Cree colleague and friend expands on his study of traditional Cree songs. Other essays widen the geographical, historical, and cultural foci of the book beyond the Quebec Crees, examining the significance of a beaded hood at Red River in 1844, scrutinizing symbols of Anishinaabe identity, and describing the struggle for indigenous human rights at the United Nations. Building on Preston's pioneering work in cultural anthropology, Together We Survive recounts the ways in which the eastern James Bay Cree and other aboriginal peoples, faced with massive incursions on their lands and lives, have collaborated and formed respectful partnerships as they seek to survive and thrive in peace. Contributors include Regna Darnell (Western), Harvey A. Feit (McMaster), John S. Long (Nipissing), Stan L. Louttit, Richard T. McCutcheon (Algoma), the late Cath Oberholtzer (Trent), Laura Peers (Oxford), Jennifer Preston, Susan Preston, Adrian Tanner (Memorial) and Cory Willmott (Southern Illinois).

In January 1832, in the most southern part of Ontario’s James Bay, an elderly Cree man by the name of Quapakay was told by the spirits of the shaking tent that in order to survive the winter, he was required to "spoil" the post at Hannah Bay, a Hudson's Bay Company goose hunting station. Following the directions of the spirits, Quapakay and his sons carried out this ill-fated task, resulting in the deaths of sixteen occupants of the Hannah Bay post. Now known as the "Hannah Bay Massacre," the victims included fur trader William Corrigal, the postmaster and his wife, and seven other Indigenous people. When the Spirit Calls explores the social, cultural, and historical context in which the Hannah Bay tragedy took place, as gleaned from the Hudson Bay Company’s archival records and elucidations by Cree oral traditions. The research is the culmination of over forty years of investigation by Edward J. Hedican in Indigenous communities, from the mid-1970s to the present day. In the book, Hedican aims to uncover the circumstances, behaviours, and attitudes that led to the slaughter. When the Spirit Calls sheds light on the racist attitudes held by the white settler population towards Indigenous people – attitudes that were prevalent in our colonial past and that continue to this very day.