The fact of the awards was documented. The specific dates on which particular awards were formally presented and the specific ceremonies at which they occurred have been described differently in different sources; some accounts place the initial presentation in 1945, others reference a ceremony in 1961 at her Château des Milandes where the Legion of Honor was formally presented. The sources consulted for this article do not fully resolve this discrepancy; what is clear is that she received all three honors and that the official recognition of her wartime service was real and formal.
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## Château des Milandes and the Rainbow Tribe
After the war, Josephine Baker consolidated her life at the Château des Milandes, a large estate in the Dordogne region of southwest France that she had been associated with since the wartime years. She bought the property and transformed it into the site of an experiment she cared about deeply: the Rainbow Tribe.
Beginning in the early 1950s, Baker adopted twelve children from different countries, different racial backgrounds, and different religious traditions. She called them her “Rainbow Tribe,” and she described the project explicitly as an experiment in human brotherhood — a demonstration, conducted in public at a country estate in France, that children of different ethnicities and religions could grow up together, love each other, and show the world that the divisions that had produced so much of the century’s violence were not natural or inevitable.
The children came from Japan, Morocco, Algeria, Finland, Venezuela, France, Colombia, Ivory Coast, and elsewhere. They were raised together at the Château des Milandes, which Baker opened to paying visitors who could observe the experiment firsthand. The estate had hotels, restaurants, a farm, and facilities that she developed over years into a kind of living museum of human possibility.