“We are here to say that we were wrong,” they said at a ceremony with tribal leaders in which a copy of the doctrine was burned.

Clergy prayed with the protesters, known as “water protectors,” but Harrington said she felt more action was needed.

“Prayer is a beautiful thing and it’s the thing that we need to begin with, but it’s not the thing we should end with,” she said.

So on Nov. 3 she and four other clergy members, all of whom expected to be arrested, decided to kneel on the lawn of the governor’s mansion in an attempt to “see if we might have a cup of tea with him and talk some sense into him” about opposing the pipeline. That’s when they were arrested.

The $3.7 billion, 1,200-mile pipeline is being built to transport oil from North Dakota to a distribution center in Illinois, according to Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline. The company’s website says about 470,000 barrels of oil would travel through the 30-inch diameter pipeline daily.