This depiction of Christopher Columbus's first encounter with the natives perfectly portrays the common idea of how this meeting transpired.  The Native American's are shown as a curious people to the wonders the Europeans bestowed upon them.  Accordingly, the natives are shown as lesser beings compared to the grandeur of the Europeans.  Columbus was a large proponent towards the idea of inferiority due to lack of infrastructure.

This article mainly dealt with the origins of Indians but it does make a statement coinciding with the common viewpoint of the European settlers; that Indians were somehow sub-human.  The natives were, according to this article, the least developed of the human race, therefore making them inferior to all other races.  The lack of technology, mainly the ability to make and use iron, filled the rest of the article and, possibly, led to their deportation out of their own land.  The final point was that the Native American's had made no attempt to reach out to other civilizations (apart from the Americas), which baffled the wealth-seeking Europeans.  Unfortunately, this helped justify the inferior vs. superior mentality.

The idea of assimilation of the natives seemed noble, but, as this text proves, the settlers minds were not into the idea completely.  While attempting this cause, the "civilized" people often looked down on the natives and essentially downplaying their intellect based on purely biased criteria.  One example was when officials tried to talk down to the natives level in explaining governmental issues to a people who couldn't possibly understand their system of governing.   The early American authors blamed this ignorance on inferiority rather than the simple fact that they had never been exposed to such establishments.

Another idea of cultural inferiority vs. superior culture comes to play in this article.  This conflict was bound to happen and would inevitably wind up in each cultures literature, according to this author.  The battle between a culture that had existed without much change against a fierce new culture that advocates change was not going to end well for one culture and unfortunately the aggression of the European culture overwhelmed the native's culture.  As a result, native texts become lost or corrupted and modern scholars have difficulty discovering history according to the Native Americans.