A Janesville man who championed Native American rights and helped shepherd hundreds of people through sobriety at his Red Road House addiction recovery center has died.
Friends say Billy Bob Grahn had cancer and severe heart disease. He died Tuesday at age 69.
Mark Bumpus, a longtime colleague at Grahn’s Red Road House, says Grahn’s spirit stands tall for anyone Grahn ever helped get sober. Bumpus says he was one of those people.
Bumpus says Grahn took him into the Red Road House on Janesville’s south side and took him under his wing. Bumpus says Grahn encouraged him to do something for others, such as volunteering to help youths and the homeless.
“Because of that, I got involved in the community part of Janesville. I was on Janesville Mobilizing 4 Change for the last 10 years, and I was on the city’s (alcohol) license (advisory) committee,” Bumpus said. “It’s been giving back to the community, and getting out from inside myself.”
Grahn took Bumpus in at the Red Road House in 2008. If that hadn’t happened, Bumpus thinks his addiction might have killed him in less than a year.
“I wouldn’t have been alive in 2009,” he said.
Grahn was a recovering addict, too, and a member of the Bad River Ojibwe, a Native American tribe in northern Wisconsin.
Bumpus says Grahn traveled far and wide in the Midwest championing Native American rights.
Once, Bumpus says Grahn brought a ceremonial, eagle-feather staff to attend a protest at the state Capitol in Madison of a planned fossil fuel pipeline expansion that was set to route straight through Native American lands.
Bumpus says police monitoring that protest wanted to confiscate Grahn’s eagle staff because they thought it might get used as a weapon. But Bumpus says everyone at the protest knew Grahn because of his years rallying for the Native American community.
The protesters all clustered around Grahn and would not allow police to take his sacred staff.
“His friends surrounded him and talked to the Capitol police, and they said ‘Over your dead body; it’s a sacred artifact,'” Bumpus said. “He was allowed to leave with the staff — and he wasn’t arrested. It’s those kinds of things. He would stand up for any kind of whatever.”
Some Native Americans believe the “Red Road” is a lifelong path of spiritual duty. Bumpus says during Grahn’s life, that’s what the Red Road House was all about.
He believes Grahn is now taking the last steps on his spirit journey.
“We had a talk the other night in my dream,” Bumpus said. “We had a talk on Sunday night, and I had my say with him.”
Grahn ran the nonprofit Red Road House since 1992, sometimes bankrolling the halfway house out of his own pocket.
More recently, it was COVID-19 recovery funds that fueled Grahn’s recovery center, and that funding ran out. Meanwhile, Grahn became more and more ill.
In March, the Red Road House Board said in a message to the community it could probably fund about another two months before the halfway house would run out of cash in its 33rd year.
Supporters have tried to raise money to keep the Red Road House in operation, including a GoFundMe that has raised about $5,000 to date.
