Alita's Curse

Alita’s Curse is a fictional story based on a 1904 sea otter hunt and the lives of my great grandparents, Alita Kochutin-Berikoff and Emilian Z. Berikoff. Through strength and keen inventiveness, the Unangan have lived and thrived on the Aleutian Archipelago, a chain of islands that separate the Bering Sea from the Pacific Ocean, for nine thousand years. In the 18th century the Russian fur traders who claimed to have discovered these islands left disparaging documents about the Unangan isla...