The Gift
Gift: The person
behind the name
Dominic Mark Phillips was born in Bebington, Merseyside, England, in 1964. Born into a middle-class family, he began his English studies in Liverpool, but did not complete his degree due to a greater goal: to get to know people and the world. Before Brazil, Dom lived in Denmark, Israel, Greece, and Australia.
Dom was an ethical, loving and kind person. He had a deep connection with nature.
There’s more to him than just pages and paragraphs. His friends know him as the smiling guy who gets up before sunrise to go stand-up paddleboarding. We know him as the guy who’s anxiously awaiting the paperwork so he can adopt a child with his wife. Dom is the friend who texts us on WhatsApp on our birthdays and the volunteer who taught English in the favelas. One of the first things he did in Salvador was get involved with Jovens Inovadores, a public health program at UFBA. There, he was surrounded by young people, teenagers who he fondly described as equally loud, distracted and full of curiosity about the world.
— Excerpt from a letter written by 40 international correspondents and friends of Dom Phillips during the searches in June 2022.
Music:
the first passion
Like his parents and siblings, Dom has always loved music. As a teenager, he formed a band with his friends and played on the streets as an amateur artist. His career began precisely because of this passion, producing the music fanzines “The Subterranean” and “New City Press” and, while still young, participating in a weekly radio show as a DJ.
Interested in the vibrant English music scene of the 90s, Dom began working at MixMag magazine, which became a reference in electronic music culture. After some time, he decided to write a book about DJs and the history of this movement, called “Superstar DJs, Here We Go: The Rise and Fall of the Superstar DJs.” It was while writing this book that he arrived in São Paulo in 2007 to spend a year. But Dom feels so at home that he never returns to England.
After 4 years, he moved to Rio de Janeiro and married Alessandra Sampaio. He began covering culture, politics, economics, public health, socio-environmental issues and the country's preparations for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. He was a freelance correspondent for major global media outlets such as the Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Intercept and The Guardian.
Amazon:
Journey of discovery
His first published article about the Amazon was in 2015 by The Washington Post, when he visited a large mine in Pará and identified the environmental, social and economic impacts of the project. From then on, his curiosity and interest in the Amazon biome grew and his network of contacts in the forest expanded.
In 2018, Dom met Bruno on an expedition to the Javari Valley, home to one of the largest concentrations of isolated indigenous people in the world. In the report that emerged from this trip, Dom made his passion for the forest clear, as when he described indigenous boys who had beaten “a beehive to scare away the bees” and then shared “its rusty-red honeycomb, dripping with sweet, wild honey.” For him, enchantment was the key to reconnecting with nature, inspiring a relationship of care and respect for it.
During his numerous trips to the Amazon, Dom realized that the people of the forest and the professionals who worked to keep it protected should have their important knowledge shared with the world. With this in mind, in 2020 he began writing the book “How to save the Amazon: Ask the people who know”, which led him to the Javari Valley in June 2022 to interview indigenous people about their protection measures against invaders, as well as riverside and fishing communities. Dom and Bruno were working when they were murdered. They were determined professionals and understood that, even though they worked in different areas, it was very important to join forces for the greater goal of protecting the forest and everyone who lives in it.
Francisco Piyãko, leader of the Ashaninka community in Acre – one of the last places Dom Phillips visited – in interview with BBC.
His legacy:
an enchanted spirit
Beliefs of several indigenous ethnic groups predict that when someone with such a close relationship with the forest dies, their spirit becomes an enchanted one: a sacred protector of the forests, who demands retribution from human beings when they mistreat nature. Dom was enchanted.
On land, his legacy extends from the international visibility of violence in the Amazon to the completion of his book by journalist friends. As an Institute, we honor his commitment to bringing knowledge from inside the forest to the outside, so that everyone can allow themselves, just as he did, to be enchanted while still alive.
