St. Joseph Island first appeared on European maps in the 1670s. A map by French explorer René de Bréhant de Galinée labels it "Anipich", after a Ojibwe word meaning "place of the hardwood trees". The Ojibwe would call the island "Payentanassin" as well. But by the 1740s the island came to be called "Saint Joseph" by Europeans, presumably so-named by Jesuit missionaries in honour of the church they were building on the island. A 1735 French map is believed to be the first to use the name ""Isle St. Joseph."" A detailed 1744 map by French geographer Jacques Nicolas Bellin depicts a route for "batteau" north east of the island and a canoe route on the south west, however it shows no mission or settlement real or abandoned anywhere on the island. The name "Cariboux Island" was also given to the island briefly in the 1790s, though this only appears on a British map of the St. Marys River of the early 1790s and is used incidentally within the St. Joseph Island Treaty in 1798.