CBC journalist Jody Porter remembered for her compassionate storytelling, commitment to truth

Friends, colleagues and others who knew Jody Porter have shared memories and messages of love, gratitude and admiration for the longtime CBC reporter.

Messages remembering Porter touch on her life, friendship, and commitment to telling hard, necessary truths about residential schools and colonialism in Canada, and their ongoing impacts on Indigenous people in northern Ontario.

Porter, 50, died Tuesday after living with ovarian cancer for several years.

Michelle Derosier, an Anishinaabe filmmaker and Porter's close friend, said she was drawn to her not just because of the stories she told through her journalism, but how she held and shared those stories.

"She became a safe place in the community early on for me as a community member, as an Indigenous woman," Derosier said.

"As a storyteller myself, I would often go to her in the early days of our relationship with stories, whether they were something that was going to become part of a story, or whether there was just a story I wanted her to hold. She would do that, and she would do that with such grace, and integrity and love."

Raised in southern Ontario, Porter graduated from Centennial College with a diploma in journalism. She spent a brief period as a journalist in the Northwest Territories before moving to Sioux Lookout, Ont., in 1998.

In Sioux Lookout, she was the editor for the Wawatay Native Communications Society, an independent, self-governing media organization dedicated to telling stories from the 49 First Nations that make up the Nishnawbe Aski Nation in northern Ontario.

Garnet Angeconeb, an Anishinaabe elder and former journalist, was the interim executive director at the time. Angeconeb remembers hiring Porter for the position "within a few hours, maybe even minutes" after her interview.

In a 2020 essay she wrote for the Maisonneuve magazine, Porter said it was during that time she began visiting First Nations in the region and "got the education I was so sorely lacking."

"I began to cover stories from those communities: about homes with no drinking water, overcrowded houses full of illness, and mould and grief. About reserves with no proper schools. About the residential schools, the last of which had only recently closed," she wrote in her essay.

It was a time when Wawatay News was facing many challenges just trying to stay afloat, but Porter's work helped turn things around for the better, Angeconeb said.

"She was a gifted storyteller. She was a professional journalist in every way: tough, determined, wholehearted, honest and sincere. She believed in what she was doing," Angeconeb said in an email to CBC News.

Porter moved to Thunder Bay in 2000 to continue that work for CBC.